What I’m Reading

A good biography, I think, aims to do a few things: to paint a warm, sensitive - yet unflinching - portrait of its subject, acquainting readers with the person, warts and all; through the subject, to also tell the story of a time and an era; and to cast the subject’s work in new light, so that we consider afresh what they lived for. The merit of Nicholas Boggs’s Baldwin: A Love Story is that it does all three superlatively well.

Boggs’s conceit is that we can only truly understand a person through excavating their deepest and most meaningful relationships. The “love” of “love story,” thus, is not limited to romantic love - although romantic love was crucial to Baldwin’s life, not just for its own sake, but also as a fount for his creativity. Rather, it is a more capacious structure of feeling that includes warmth, closeness, emotional intimacy - and also the flip sides of those emotions: heartbreak, jealousy, possessiveness, and loss.

Love was something that Baldwin yearned for all his life - a yearning that was complicated by his being a black, gay man who was born in mid-century United States and could never entirely leave it, although he did leave - many times - to live elsewhere. Love, when it came to him, was always fraught with danger, with an undercurrent of violence, and with a sense of fleeting impermanence, shaped and constrained by norms, laws, institutions and prejudices that were designed to extinguish it - or to strangle it in its cradle. It was within these interstices that Baldwin crafted his life, lived his love, and created art so incandescent that decades later, it can still pull us up short, gasping for breath, when we encounter it for the first - or second, or third - time.

The book moves through Baldwin’s significant relationships (with family, with friends, with comrades, with lovers, with artistic collaborators - and sometimes, those categories all blur into each other), locating them within place and within stages of Baldwin’s life - New York, Paris, Istanbul, Saint-Paul-de-Vence - and it is through those relationships that we come to know both Baldwin, and his time.

Assessments of Baldwin often tend to privilege one aspect of his art over the other: often, Baldwin the political essayist (and civil rights icon) is illumined, at the cost of Baldwin the novelist (and the playwright). Sometimes - although rarely - it is the other way round. Much like the case of love, it is as if critics struggle with comprehending the capaciousness of Baldwin’s work, and how the facets of his art are inseparable from each other. However, as Bécquer Seguín has shown us in his magnificent book, The Op-Ed Novel, writers have often treated fiction and non-fiction as complementary: using the vehicle of fiction to push boundaries and explore ideas that would be deemed too transgressive or “off the wall” if they were written out as essays, and to use the essay form to clarify and polish ideas present as radical potentialities in their fiction.

In Baldwin: A Love Story, we are shown these two literary selves in conversation, as - in his effort to “work through things” (p. 252), Baldwin ends up engaging in a “mutual reshaping of approach.” In other words, as readers, we cannot separate Baldwin’s fiction from his non-fiction (and yes, from his dramatic work), and this is not - as has often been argued - to the detriment of his fiction, which is then perceived as too didactic. Rather, the deeper point that Boggs makes is that you cannot separate the non-fiction from the fiction because you cannot separate the aesthetic from the political. Form is woven into content for Baldwin, something that especially comes to the fore in his dramatic work, where he engages in “formal innovation in staging and dramaturgy … that would push the audience towards critical consciousness and political action.” (p. 366)

This is also significant because what comes through clearly in Baldwin: A Love Story is that for Baldwin, the stuff of literature indubitably came from the stuff of life. “What makes a writer is less his respect for Art than his respect for Life” (p. 423): these are words that stand out all the more when you consider that, after ascending to fame, Baldwin moved in the high literary society of New York (and Paris), where the foregoing aphorism was honoured far more in the breach. A few decades later, in his book of essays, Not to Read, the Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra would write of his compatriot Pedro Lemebel: “His work was forged in the night, in the barrio, in life and not in literature.” It is as if Baldwin foreshadowed this sentiment in a different time - but is it entirely a coincidence that Lemebel, like Baldwin, was a queer writer who forged his sensibility and his art in a deeply authoritarian context?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Baldwin: A Love Story feels at its soaring best when it is about Baldwin on love: on its capaciousness, on its transformative power, on its illuminations, and on the terror that it engenders. “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within”: such a line would set our consciousness alight under any circumstances, but Boggs deftly allows us to connect seemingly disparate threads: between how an openness to love strips us of our instinctive grasping towards safety on the one hand, and the imposed obsession with public safety on the other allows - and justifies - the violence that maintains an unjust racial and capitalist order.

Elsewhere, Boggs quotes Baldwin on the “false safety of innocence” that White America seeks to preserve in order to maintain its racially unjust status quo. It is generative to think of this in the context of a recent, brilliant essay by Richard Hunsinger and X. Rivera Maya, titled “Public Safety or Self-Defence,” where the writers wryly note that “public safety becomes a way for reactionaries and liberals across class lines to collaborate on the task of disciplining the proletariat.” In Baldwin: A Love Story, we see how Baldwin’s life and work was devoted to deconstructing this comfort shibboleth of safety, both in individual live and also when the word “public” was appended to it, in order to justify every manner of atrocity. Zambra again: “Fiction only triumphs when it fails, when it lets us see the traces of reality.”

This same interior landscape is at work on a subject that Boggs might have lightly passed over, but which - to his credit - he squarely confronts. In the early 1960s, Baldwin was invited to visit the State of Israel, which he did - with some enthusiasm, at least before going. Once there, however, it did not take Baldwin too long to spot what was amiss in the project (we should bear in mind that this was many years before historians began to reveal the truth of the 1948 nakba, and Baldwin - obviously - would not have had access to first-hand Palestinian accounts). Appreciation quickly turned to critique, something that placed Baldwin firmly outside the consensus of the American literary and cultural world of the late-20th century. And yet, when we think of Baldwin’s own commitment to “be a stranger everywhere” - and recall that for him, literary and political commitments were always intertwined - this should come as no great surprise. Here was a writer and a person who was unafraid of placing himself firmly outside the consensus, especially when he could perceive what that consensus strove so desperately to mask. This proclivity - as Boggs shows us - led to Baldwin’s abandonment by the same literary establishment that had once held him up. He didn’t care - and time has granted to him the last laugh.

At 700 pages, Baldwin: A Love Story is not a quick read. In other words, it demands of us a modicum the same dedication and the same love that Baldwin brought to his life and to his craft, and indeed, the dedication and love that Boggs has tapped into to write this book. And it cannot be any other way: after all, the deepest truth about a love worth having is that it will always make demands upon us, and in the process, compel both terror and transformation.

The book (or rather, book series) that shaped me the most as a teenager was Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. It is hard to overstate quite how it rewired my brain, and how it gave shape to the inchoate anti-authority feeling that I had long tried to articulate as a coherent world-view, but which only sputtered itself out through various meaningless acts of revolt in school (and which only gave me grief). And one of the other things that His Dark Materials did was to inspire a lifelong curiosity about John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the poem that it drew inspiration from.

I eventually got around to reading Paradise Lost in my first year of college: I loved its rhythm and cadence, cheered all the way for Satan’s rebellion, and was repulsed by the in-your-face misogyny, all in equal measure. As a first-year law student who had just read H.L.A. Hart’s The Concept of Law, I was also fascinated by the jurisprudential implications of Satan having persuaded one-third of the angels to rebel with him. In the college corridors, I buttonholed unsuspecting seniors and asked them if they did not think that Satan had a point when he pointed out to the angel Abdiel that he had one-third of the heavenly host with him, and did that not indicate that the Hartian rule of recognition no longer existed to bind the said angels in any meaningful way?

So, Orlando Reade’s What In Me is Dark felt like a book written especially for me, because it is all about how, through the ages, rebels, poets, rebel-poets and poet-rebels, all found something in the pages of Paradise Lost. Among other figures, the book talks of Thomas Jefferson (who, I found, had underlined the same passage that I had - “what though the field be lost?”), George Eliot, C.L.R. James, the romantic poets, and so on.

Not all these figures are revolutionary, or even egalitarian: some, like a group of white carnivalists in ante-bellum New Orleans actually put the epic to racist purposes. What In Me is Dark, thus, is not an uncritical praise-song, and it does not claim that the resources in Paradise Lost are available only to the “devil’s party.” But at the same time, I think that the supremacist uses that Paradise Lost is put to are weaker and less persuasive - and ultimately, rely upon the most dated parts of the epic. What has endured in Milton - and what every generation rediscovers and recovers - is the irrepressible human desire to cock a snook at authority. It is a desire that most of us keep suppressed most of our waking moments; Paradise Lost lets us live it for just an instant in time.

A few years ago, a translated novel appeared on the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist: Harve Le Tellier’s The Anomaly, a time-vortex novel with more than a touch of the bizarre. As a science fiction novel, I found The Anomaly flawed but also weird in the best of ways. I picked up The Name on the Wall on the strength of my experience with The Anomaly.

It is an entirely different book (perhaps speaking to Le Tellier’s versatility). The Name on the Wall is a cross between auto-fiction and historical fiction: finding a name carved on a slab in a home he wants to buy, the writer finds out that it is the name of a French WWII Resistance fighter who perished in the last months of the War, in the Maquis. This leads him on a quest to reconstruct the young soldier’s life, and that of his family and his lover.

The Name on the Wall is at its best in its reflections on complicity and courage (one line in particular - “it is not needed that men be evil; only that they be spineless” - made me shudder). The moral clarity shines through: “But I can find no shred of indulgence for the people who allowed their hatred or - worse - their cowardice or careerism to define their destiny.” And yet, moral clarity is not quite enough to make it a memorable read: World War II is, by now, a heavily over-written subject, and I waited for Le Tellier to universalise these sentiments by drawing them beyond their immediate context. At a couple of points, to his credit, he does try (in the context of colonialism, specifically), but it isn’t quite there. All of which makes The Name on the Wall a serviceable read - but not more.

I picked this book up because I am a sucker for science fiction that breaks down our notions of biological determinism, and really plays with our biologically-grounded notions of self and identity. This book - a subversive take on the classic first contact story, set on a seemingly hostile planet where two human societies from two different worlds struggle to survive - does do that, and there were parts of it that I loved. The biology was deliciously eerie and mind-bending, the way the landscape was described was immersive, and one of its central points of narrative conflict (which I will not reveal here to avoid spoilers) was brilliantly crafted, with my only complaint being that the writer should have excavated it a little more.

And yet, there were parts that did not sit entirely well with me. There were moments of deus ex machina that were a little too pat. The notion of far-future societies grappling with what seemed to be a decidedly early-twentieth century, decidedly Anglo-American conception of marriage was a little jarring; of course, I am not saying that far-future societies cannot be socially regressive, but when the specific form of regression seems to replay a very specific cultural and temporal institution, it takes you out of both the SF-nal context, and out of the universalism that makes the best science fiction truly stand apart. And finally, this book has a character called “Sudharma Jain,” member of a race of translators (the “Jains”), who are characterised by their extreme aversion to violence, reflected in particular in their diet. In this book, Sudharma Jain is portrayed as a near-godlike figure, ascetic and immune from the flaws that roil the other characters.

I do think that if western writers are going to be this on the nose when borrowing from a non-western context, then they should also do some homework. There was absolutely no reason why there needed to be a race called “the Jains” in this book, but if you have made that choice, then it behooves you to also engage with all the many problematic aspects that accompany this specific vision of dietary non-violence, especially in modern-day India. Things will get messy very soon, because then you will have to deal with all kinds of uncomfortable questions around the link between dietary rules, purity, and caste exclusion. And while I’d be perfectly happy for a book to grapple with that discomfort - regardless of who wrote it - there is a creeping orientalism/philo-orientalism to the depiction of “the Jains” and their representative character that I found very jarring. It is a pity, because - as I have noted above - the writer did not need to use this name; any other name would have done. Having chosen to use it, though, the accompanying flattening raised my hackles.

I’d still recommend the book for readers who are interested in the kind of science fiction I talked about in the opening paragraph, because What We Are Seeking does do that extremely well, and pushes the boundaries of our taxonomic categories with great skill. But I’d recommend it with a modicum of discomfort - the discomfort that I wish the book had elected to grapple with.

I hardly need to reiterate that Keigo Higashino is an auto-buy for me: the moment there is a new translation, I buy and read it. As with all his previous books, this was a single-sitting read. It’s always so hard to substantively review a Higashino, because every plot point is a spoiler reveal; so I’ll only say that this story - with two murders set decades apart - does what Higashino is best at: the moral ambiguity that lies at the heart of society’s notion of what constitutes a “crime” and what does not.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

Another work of science fiction that I have very ambivalent feelings about is Arcane. I loved everything about the first season, but the second-season queer romance between the rebel and the cop left me cold. I did not know that there were now franchise novels - in particular, C.L. Clark’s Ambessa: Chosen of the Wolf; and I found this review by Catherine Bakervery interesting, especially for Arcane fans as well as Arcane undecideds.

The Indian Scene

Prashanth Srivatsa is building a repository of contemporary Indian SFF, which you can find here. Browse - and buy! - at your pleasure.

Recommendations Corner

From a Le Tellier book that didn’t quite convince me, how about one that did - for the most part? I read The Anomaly as part of my long review of the 2023 Clarke Award shortlist, and here’s a summary of the plot (click through for the full review, but there are spoilers):

At first blush, Hervé le Tellier’s The Anomaly is not a story about the climate crisis. It belongs to the tradition of thought-experiment SF, where you imagine one alteration to our world, and ask “what if?” As a flight signals its approach into an airport, it is discovered that it—and everyone on board—is an exact copy of a flight, flying the same route, that had landed three months ago. The internal time clock of those on board remains unchanged. Thus, for a select group of individuals in the world, there now exist two “sets” of the same person—only, one with a three-month time lag. The Anomaly explores how the State might respond, how society might respond—and, most strikingly—how the individuals might themselves respond. “People rarely have the opportunity to save a relationship before it’s even in danger,” writes one of the characters—in one of the most moving passages of the book—having seen, in the three-month lag, that his partner has left him. “I want to have a second chance before I ruin the first one” (p. 317).

See also: Dan Hartland’s review.

Along with the folks at Champaca Bookshop, I am curating a science fiction Book Box/Book Club. This follows Champaca’s model of a themed book box, where readers/subscribers are sent one “surprise” book a month from a chosen genre, over a period of time.

For the science fiction Book Box, it will be six books over six months, curated into three sub-themes: climate fiction, space opera, and revisited classics. For each of these themes, we’ll also have a book discussion.

For more information, and a subscription link, see here.

What I’m Reading

This is a book that I really wanted to love, and - going by its description - should have loved: a story set in mid-1970s Italy (a period that I’m fascinated by), involving queer love, art and cinema, and the last days of Pier Paolo Pasolini. A young, queer English man flees from an unrevealed traumatic event to Italy, where he is suborned by his new lover to work, first, on a Fellini film, and then with Pasolini. The story proceeds through a series of episodic vignettes that drive it forward, many of which are set in - and around - the process of film-making. With all the ingredients to hand, though, The Silver Book simply did not hang together, for me: it felt curiously disjointed, stuttering from episode to episode, punctuated by impressionistic observations about the meaning and nature of art that didn’t quite land.

Perhaps the The Silver Book’s finest moments are near the end, in its brief character sketches of a doomed Pasolini. Lines such as “… and he goes on to say that everybody else knows these things, too, but they all refuse to speak, so as to preserve a world that is already unliveable…” and “because most people, not Pasolini, are ruled by fear…” give you a crystallised image of Pasolini with an utmost economy of words. This makes the events leading up to the book’s climax fraught with both intensity and emotion; unfortunately, it all comes just a little too late in the story.

I Think of You is a set of short stories by Ahdaf Soueif, set in Egypt and Britain (and sometimes moving between the two countries). They deal, primarily, with love in the everyday and the quotidian, love that is shaped by issues of migration and cultural alienation (and assimilation), but which also carries the imprint of the universal. I enjoyed these stories as I read them, but - a couple of weeks later - I barely remember anything of them. Perhaps that is the point!

For this month’s meeting of the Delhi Science Fiction Reading Circle (next week!), we decided to revisit Iain M. Banks, and iconic The Culture series, with The Hydrogen Sonata. I’ve read most of the Culture novels by now, with The Hydrogen Sonata one of my unread outliers (in part, I think, because it’s one of the lesser-discussed Culture novels). It was an omission that I was happy to put right.

The Hydrogen Sonata takes place on the eve of a great galactic event: the species of the Gzilt is about to undergo the Sublimation - that is, to abandon the material galaxy and move to a non-corporeal, higher plane of existence (that is the best description one can give of Sublimation, which is - perhaps intentionally - left fuzzy in the details). It is a fraught time for the Gzilt, and tensions are heightened when long-buried secrets - which might threaten the Sublimation itself - are brought to the fore. A group of Culture Minds (for those who have not read Banks, Minds are extremely powerful and sophisticated AIs spaceships, which run the Culture’s post-scarcity, utopian civilisation) take it upon themselves to investigate, along with some willing - and unwilling - human and Gzilt accomplices. In their search for the truth, they enter into a perilous race against the countdown to Sublimation - an event that some actors will do anything to see completed

I think that what characterises Banks’ work is that at the core of most of his novels, there is a very simple - and very classic - set of issues around the human condition, which assume galactic - one could even say, operatic - significance. In The Hydrogen Sonata, these were the ones I spotted:

1. The use of myth to create a national - or, in this case - a species identity, and the potential for grave disruption if it is revealed that that identity does rest upon just a myth (think Ismail Kadare, but space opera);

2. The ethical consequences of creating a “simulation” to model your own behaviour, where the simulation itself is so life-like that it is, in effect, life itself, with its own agency and existence (I recently read another variant of this in Alastair Reynolds’ Century Rain);

3. The effects of extreme longevity upon memory, and how the human mind is simply incapable of processing a situation where it can remember everything (think Borges, but space opera).

In various ways, literature has engaged with these ideas for a very long time - that’s why I could immediately think of literary analogues for two of the three core themes in The Hydrogen Sonata. The power of Banks’ novels, I think, lies in how these resonant themes lie at the heart of his work, and how the stakes around them are so magnified because, often, the future of an entire species, or a planet, of star-systems, rest on their resolution.

Having now read most of Culture, I have done that thing which all Culture fans do: prepare a rank-list of novels. Here’s mine (excluding Matter, which I haven’t read yet): Look to Windward > Excession > Surface Detail > The Hydrogen Sonata > The Player of Games > Use of Weapons »»»»»»»»»»» Consider Phlebas.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

We are Hugo Finalists again (shortlist here!) - I think for the fourteenth year. A record of one win in fourteen is not all that excellent, though, so let’s see if we buck the trend this year (insert usual caveats about the subjectivity and limitations of literary awards).

The Indian Scene

Nothing stirring at the moment. Oh, I’ve been reading the submissions to Volume 2 of the If Anthology of New Indian SFF. Total submissions: 226. Present reading count: 85. So we go on! My respect for editors shoots up every time I do this.

Recommendations Corner

How about a non-Culture novel from Banks? Feersum Endjinn has one of the most memorable beginnings to a science fiction novel that I’ve ever read - a man waking up, being murdered, being resurrected through a backed-up version, being murdered again - all the way down to his last life, when he manages to (barely) escape thanks to intervention by a copy of himself (created by himself for just such an eventuality), and even as he continues being hunted.

Most of the action takes place in a vast fortress, which - when you combine it with travels through a virtual cyber-reality, and a background plot detail involving the imminent destruction of the planet, as it is drifting into an interstellar molecular cloud - creates a most bizarre melding of genres - thriller, Gothic, cyberpunk, science fiction, dashes of fantasy. I don’t really know if it all hangs together, but whether or not it does, there’s nothing quite like it!

First, some news on the writing front: Earlier this week, I finished writing the first draft of the sequel to THE SENTENCE/THE FIFTH INFLECTION. It is obviously very rough, with more plot holes than a sweeping cloth, a bit like Paris’ Pompidou Centre building with all its innards and plumbing visible on the outside, but it exists!

I remain bewildered by my own writing process. I commenced work on this novel with a plot outline in mid-June last year, and you’d think that ten months for a 92,000-word first draft sounds about right. Except that after the outline, I did no writing until October; wrote 35,000 words in three weeks in October; then experienced another crippling block until mid-March; and then wrote 57,000 words in one month between mid-March and mid-April. This replicates, in a more stark way, my process with my previous novels: long periods of teeth-gnashing stasis, followed by a few weeks of writing where it all comes out, where - after months of looking for a word in vain - I can’t do anything but write. I would much prefer to have a steady, consistent routine - it would certainly trigger a lot less self-hate - but this is the way it is.

All of which is to say, I suppose, that there really is no process except your own. There are writers who swear by the “write something every day, even if it is 250 words,” but if you can’t, I suppose the lesson is to trust your own process and be gentle with yourself (easier said than done!). The words will come, they just may not come “as naturally as the Leaves to a tree” (Keats).

There’s a long way ahead now, with beta reads, edits, revisions, rewritings, and then submission, but for now, a first draft exists. I’ll leave you with a bit of a ToC teaser.

Last week, an article was doing the rounds on social media about how English-language Indian writers “of significance” must reside abroad. It produced a familiar list of example to substantiate its point - Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri etc. I didn’t care much for the piece - what does “significance” mean anyway - but at one trivial level, its argument was not incorrect. If, by “significance,” you mean being on literary awards lists, being features in the NYT, or “moving” through the high-literary circuit, then obviously living abroad (and here, “abroad” invariably means New York or London, not Nairobi or Santiago) gives you an advantage, because that is where publishing power (financial and social) resides. And power tends to flow from its origin, so it also follows that writers who establish themselves in those circuits will be taken more seriously “back home.” There is nothing particularly controversial about this observation - it’s hardly a point worth making.

What did amuse me, however, was that a number of Anglophone Indian writers living in India decided to take umbrage at this. Their reaction was to produce a counter-canon of English-language writers living in India who are also of “significance.” You won’t be surprised to note that, coincidentally, these multiple lists tended to converge upon the same names (with many of the writers recommending each other), and which also happen to be already much-awarded and much-marketed within the Indian literary eco-system (I came across a tweet thread, followed immediately by a Scroll piece, where the two lists - ostensibly written by separate people, independent of each other - overlapped to a wild degree).

This is an exercise in tedium, if only for how often it repeats itself. The response of a sub-set of Indian writers to the issue of geographic marginalisation seems to be to double down on local gatekeeping, and make the boundaries of their own in-group and out-group even more rigid. The original piece could have been a springboard for a more inclusive conversation about publishing power and how to address it; it could have been an occasion for bringing in a wider subset of English-language writers and critics who live and work in the country; what it became was an opportunity for a series of scold-y tweet threads and angst-ridden pieces, coalescing around the message: “if you don’t read these flag-bearers of English-language Indian fiction, then there’s something wrong with you.”

I suppose this can be a topic of discussion at the next edition of the formerly-Zee, now Vedanta Jaipur Literature Festival, where all of these writers congregate in any event. So it goes.

What I’m Reading

Over the last week, I read the newly-released fourth instalment in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children series. Along with many others, I maintain that the book which launched the series, Children of Time, remains one of the best modern science fiction novels. Children of Strife brings together many of the species that we encounter previously in the series - the memorable spider-intelligence of Children of Time, the intelligent octopi of Children of Ruin, the augmented humans - all of which have banded together in a largely peaceable space-faring society - along with a more fractious species of stomatopods, also from the original planet in Children of Time. For readers familiar with the series, Children of Strife reprises an old theme: the human will to destruction and conflict, confronted by a species (or an alliance of species) whose behaviour hews to a fundamentally different logic.

It’s a worthy addition to the Children series, and in a way, it serves as a retrospective (the story toggles between three different Ages) - although at 670 pages, I did find myself wishing that it had been a little shorter.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

If you have any kind of passing acquaintance with genre fiction, you’ll know that romantasy has been all the rage for at least the last two years. In a recent podcast of Critical Friends, Jenny Hamilton, Anushree Nande, and Dan Hartland get together to talk about this phenomenon, what it is, its appeal, and where it’s going.

The Indian Scene

Nothing stirring this week.

Recommendations Corner

Since we’ve been talking about Tchaikovsky and non-anthropomorphic SFF, here’s returning to a book/writer I’ve recommended at least once before on this newsletter, if not twice (but it’s never too much!). Yoss is a Cuban punk rocker/biochemist/science fiction writer, whose books are madly inventive. In A Planet for Rent, earth has been turned into a tourist destination for highly-advanced alien species, who come here and do, Roadside Picnic style, exactly what a median-callous group of human tourists do when they go on vacation. The interconnected/mosaic stories in A Planet for Rent are often told from the aliens’ perspective, which is what makes this such a fun read. Also, if you’ve ever wondered about the hypothetical mechanics of hypothetical alien sex, then wonder no more.

Read a review of the book at Asymptote Journal, here.

What I’m Reading

It finally happened: I (re)-read the book that inspired the title of this newsletter: Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest: the classic novella about a colonised society of peaceable near-humans (the evolutionary tree diverged millions of years ago) called the Athsheans, who are finally able to overthrow their genocidal human overlords by themselves discovering the methods of mass violence. It was the chosen book for the April meeting of the Delhi Science Fiction Reading Circle, which happened yesterday. It was also the third in a series of first-contact/inter-species conflict novels that we’d read this year: in February, we discussed Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Alien Clay, and last month, our pick was China Mieville’s Embassytown.

It’s always fascinating to come back to a classic of the genre, especially when you’re returning to it after a decade - a decade of immersion in the genre. On this read, I found new things to appreciate about The Word for World is Forest. One is how elegantly Le Guin treads the line between modelling her primary protagonist and antagonist upon familiar archetypes, and turning them into caricatures. The violent colonial officer, Davidson, is given a rich interior life, which allows him to appear as a classic, 19th-century imperial apparatchik, but not just as a stand-in for an idea. The anthropologist Lyubov’s individual kindness is impossible to separate from his place in a violent structure, which complicates both his character arc, and its ending. Lyubov, in short, recalls centuries of seemingly benign colonial scientists, who saw their role as reaffirming the separation of power and knowledge - while, in truth, entrenching knowledge-production as a pillar of colonial power. In the short space of the novella, all this could have become a pastiche, but it does not.

The second thing is how squarely the novella confronts the question of liberatory violence. In our meeting, we talked about how Selvar Thele is if Shakespeare’s Caliban had actually gained power and overthrown his oppressor. In both Shakepeare’s The Tempest and Aime Cesaire’s A Tempest, Caliban is presented as a colonised individual who has not forsaken his agency - but nonetheless, lacks the power to shape the world according to his agency. In The Word for World is Forest, that power comes from the discovery of violence, in an almost Fanonian sense. But there are no easy resolutions, as at the end, when the “Terrans” - now defeated - are about to depart, Selvar admits that violence, having entered Athshean society, will now become an inextricable part of it. Having gained their freedom through violence, will the Athsheans now turn that violence inward, as the Algerian Revolution did after its success? Le Guin leaves the question open.

And finally, I was struck once again by how unique Le Guin is in blending the lyrical style of high fantasy with the conceits of science fiction. It is not as frequent here as it is in, say, Rocannon’s World, but it is nonetheless unmistakable. In our discussion, we wondered if we could think of other writers who combine these forms so effortlessly, and the only one we came up with was - occasionally - Robert Jackson Bennett (for example, in Foundryside).

At the same time, the re-read revealed moments that were jarring, and that illustrated how, no matter how good a writer is, they are of their time. As with my re-read of The Dispossessed, here too, I found an uncomfortable gender essentialism pervading the novella, which - even as it attempted to articulate a progressive gender politics - ended up entrenching gender identity and gender roles. It wasn’t a pervasive theme, but wherever it showed up, it stuck out like a sore thumb.

But small irritants aside, The Word for World is Forest is a reminder of how complex, layered, and richly nuanced a first-contact story can be, even if its core premise - violent human colonisers meet peaceable alien species and try to enslave and destroy them - is most thoroughly trope-ified. You just need a Le Guin to do it!

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

We continued to publish the pieces in our special issue on fungi in SFF throughout the week, and you can now read the complete issue here.

The Indian Scene

For Indian readers, Amal Singh’s new novel, Slow Burn, is out later this month, and presently available for pre-orders here.

Today’s The Hindu carries a review of Between Worlds: the IF Anthology of New Indian SFF, which you can read here (and get thee book here).

Recommendations Corner

There is an adage that a writer only truly finds their voice in their fourth novel. If that be so, then Worlds of Exile and Illusion - a collection of Ursula Le Guin’s first three novels (A Wizard of Earthsea was the fourth!) - is a fascinating window into a writer in the process of finding their voice. These three novels - Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions - are patchy and uneven (as you might expect!), but at the same time, you see glimpses of the literary style and aesthetic - and that sweet spot at the intersection of SF and fantasy - that found its apogee in Earthsea, The Dispossessed, and The Left Hand of Darkness.

Interestingly, within this collection, it reaches its pitch towards the end of City of Illusions: Before that, reading this book had been feeling something like a chore (interspersed with moments of brilliance): the last forty pages of City of Illusions, though, are an edge-of-your-seat read, and they have everything: lyrical prose, intense character work, unbearable tension, and all of it in the backdrop of one of those cosmic-level themes or questions that characterise the best of SF. You can almost see the end of City of Illusions transitioning into the beginning of Earthsea!

These past two weeks, I’ve been working on copy-edits for The Fifth Inflection (almost done!), and side-by-side, finally shaken off a four-month block and resumed work on the sequel. If “gardening” refers to the more chaotic end of a writing process, I must be a particularly chaotic gardener, as my process seems to involve months of inability to write and mounting self-hatred, followed by a two-week window where I can do nothing but write. Rinse and repeat. I’m hoping that this window will allow me to finish the first draft and move on to the far more pleasant task of editing, but we shall see.

What I’m Reading

Of late, I’ve been thinking of a line that I read many years ago in Stuart Jeffries’s Grand Hotel Abyss, about Walter Benjamin. “But if the storm is what we call progress,” writes Jeffries, “the angel might be seen as a likeness or symbol of Walter Benjamin in that summer of 1932 in Poveromo, as he tried, through the remembrance of writing, to redeem the past, to make whole what had been smashed. The storm was blowing, the wreckage growing, but Benjamin was attempting to stand his ground by doing the only thing he could: writing.”

I’ve been thinking about this line as I - and I think, many of us - struggle with the futility of writing as we witness bombs falling on universities, hospitals, historical landmarks, and as we see double-tap strikes on journalists and para-medics. While the non-stop, unmediated access to the violence of war is new, the violence itself is not; on occasion, knowing that in other times, there were those who struggled with exactly the same question, makes everything feel a little less lonely. As Benjamin himself noted, in an age very similar to ours, “the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.”

So, Peter E. Gordon’s new biography of Benjamin, The Pearl Diver, came at the right time. This is a carefully detailed, lovingly written account, both of the man and of the world he was born into and moved in. Gordon takes the unconventional step of beginning with Benjamin’s last day - his failed attempt to escape Europe, and his arrest (that led to him dying by suicide) - and then begins the chronology of Benjamin’s years, almost as if to suggest - in the style of Yesterday’s Tomorrow - that the ending was not inevitable, that endings are never inevitable, and that history always has its branching points. After all, it was Benjamin himself who, in his Theses on History, would raise the possibility of the past being transformed.

From there, we step into a more conventional biography, where Gordon takes us through Benjamin’s Jewish upbringing, his (desultory) engagement with early Zionism and his final turning away from it, his engagement with German literature and poetry, the travails and struggles of his academic career with its constant rejections for his orthodoxy-smashing work, the breadth and creativity that defined his prime (and for which we now know and read him), the importance of Klee’s Angel to his life and work, and of course, the tragedy of his end. And while this is very much a cliche, it is also true: for a figure so wreathed in legend, Gordon performs Benjamin the service of rendering him thoroughly human: we hear of his petty academic feuds and his insecurities, his questionable behaviour towards his romantic partners, his fraught relationship with figures like Brecht, Adorno, and Horkheimer, and the context for each of these things.

Elsewhere - in words that echo Dubravka Ugresic’s The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, that Benjamin was “a historian of losers, not just of defeated humans, but of expendable things that, back in the day, had been the last word.” As with all good biographies, The Pearl Diver casts a sudden, fresh light on this aphorism, and turns it into something more than just an aphorism - something more akin to a map, a map of both Benjamin’s interior landscape, and the “debris” of the history in which he lived.

When Benjamin wrote, in his famous essay on Proust, that it “has at its centre a loneliness which pulls the world down into its vortex with the force of a maelstrom,” it is Gordon’s deft touch that lets us see the loneliness at the heart of Benjamin’s own life, driven both by a personality that refused to conform or to be shaped into something that others wanted it to become, and a world that cast such a personality out, starting with the home, and progressively expanding into the entire circle of life. Thus, what emerges is a writer whose words still blaze, but who, in the final analysis, like all of us, ached in and with this world. That is what makes this biography perhaps the most moving account of Benjamin’s life, work, and death that I have read.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

Fungi have long fascinated me, and after a year of planning, today we published a special issue of Strange Horizons dedicated to fungi. We have stories, poetry, articles, columns, reviews, art - the works: almost a mycelial network, one might say! Check out the special issue here, and my introduction here.

The Indian Scene

I recently read - and reviewed - a new graphic novel called Zoraver and the Lost Gods. It’s set in the first two decades of the 20th century, in colonial-imperial India, and has an intriguing - and at times, chaotic - blend of historical fiction, myth, and magical realism, set in the context of the freedom struggle. I have seen similar attempts in other contexts before, but none in graphic novel format, and none that has the Indian freedom struggle as its theme.

Recommendations Corner

Since this newsletter has had a heavy dose of graphic novels and of fascism, I thought I’d recommend something we read in our reading group, many months ago: Héctor Germán Oesterheld’s 1957-1959 Argentinean graphic novel, The Eternaut, which portrays the aftermath of an alien invasion in Buenos Aries, and which - a decade later - was rewritten to include a specific dose of anti-authoritarianism. The graphic novel has attained legendary status in Argentina, had a vividly controversial publishing industry, and tragically, its own creator would go on to be disappeared by the Argentinean junta. Perhaps a particularly fitting speculative read for our times.

This is a newsletter about books and writing, but none of this takes place in a vacuum. I want to begin with recommending a few pieces that, over the last two weeks, have helped me make sense of some of what we are witnessing. Soon after the first bombs fell on Iran (including a missile that massacred 165 schoolchildren), Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi’s “The dry and the wet burn together” laid out the nature, and the stakes, of this war with unsparing clarity (you can also listen to an excellent podcast on the 20th-century history of Iran with him and Golnar Nikpour at The Dig). Shahram Khosravi’s “Defeat as a Method” locates the present war in a longer history of stymied Iranian revolutions, starting with the 1905 constitutional revolution, and in the context of the Palestinian experience. And over on Africa is Country, in “Where have all the flowers gone?”, William Shoki reflects on the redemptive possibilities in a world that actively seeks to convince us otherwise.

I am wary of those who, in a time of war and atrocity, present art and literature to us as a decontextualised, depoliticised means of solace-seeking: you can’t Forough Farrokhzad your way out of a war, just like you can’t Mahmoud Darwish your way out of a genocide. What I admire about these pieces is that they do none of that, but grapple with the politics in an unsparing way, while preserving the kernel of humanity that does not reduce it to missile stockpiles, casualty counts, and the price of oil.

What I’m Reading

Singapore is perhaps the last place in the world that you’d associate with a revolutionary movement, but three years ago, when I read Jeremy Tiang’s novel State of Emergency, it radically altered my perception of that country, and its mid-20th revolutionary and radical history.

After that, I’ve always been on the lookout for Tiang’s work (along with Viet Thanh Nguyen, he’s also one of the prominent SE Asian writers that have been very strong on Palestine); the latest I found was this translation of a book called Delicious Hunger, which takes us right back to that same revolutionary movement - and this one has been written by one of those revolutionaries. Delicious Hunger is a collection of interwoven short stories that recount the lives of the revolutionaries who spent years fighting from the forests.

These short stories are written almost as journalistic vignettes: centred around a single event (a battle, a disappearance, a death), and then unfolding outwards in a portrayal of the revolutionaries’ time in the forest, crafting a life - and lives together - both in hiding, and under fire. It is almost as if the immense strain sharpens and clarifies the true nature of the range of human emotions - from love to parting to heartbreak to solitude: the veils that we weave are stripped away, leaving nothing but the essence. These are, in a sense, simple stories - but it is a simplicity forged in the most adverse of circumstances, circumstances where superfluity could itself have mortal consequences.

It is rare, these days, to find stories of revolution written by a revolutionary (the last such book I came across, I think, was Hiwot Teffeira’s Tower in the Sky); these days, literature that makes such claims is far more about revolutionary aesthetics. It is that what makes Delicious Hunger not just a window into a time and an era that has been allowed to be forgotten, but also the most unique and irreplaceable of authorial voices.

I will confess that this book was not quite what I expected it to be: I was expecting an account of the anarchist roots of Argentinean football, perhaps something a little bit like Eduardo Galeano’s Football in Sunlight and Shadow. What the book is about - and this makes it no less interesting - is how the writer’s twin passions - anarchism, and the Argentinian football club Racing - came together in one week in 2001 when a powerful social movement overthrew the Argentinean government, just when Racing Club broke a decades-long drought and won the league title.

In the book, anarchism and football converge and diverge, in particular in how the growing neoliberalisation of the sport comes into tension with the more working class origins of supporters’ groups and fanbases, in Latin America generally, and Argentina in particular. This was particularly interesting because in the “global” leagues that most of us watch - the English Premier League, the Spanish La Liga, perhaps the Italian and German leagues - this tension has been more or less entirely submerged, subsumed by the imperatives of neoliberal globalisation. So, regardless of their origins, it seems faintly ridiculous to think of the big European clubs as “working class” or spaces for political radicalism (notwithstanding, for example, Barcelona’s history as a fount of anti-Franco resistance, or Celtic Football Club continuing to express its solidarity with Palestine).

In Latin America, however, there has not been complete subsumption, which means that the tension continues to exist - a tension that the book grapples with on multiple occasions, including the writer’s agonised decision to travel to Qatar to support the national team in the World Cup. Those parts of the book felt its most painful, and also its most honest - with the realisation that for those of us with progressive or radical politics, there exists an irreconcilable contradiction between following the sport that we love, and what that sport has now become; and all we can do is to try and hold those contradictions in balance.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

I loved this poem titled “An Inheritance of Air,” from the 9 March issue.

The Indian Scene

Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s Intergalactic Feast, the sequel to Interstellar Megachef, is now out and available to order.

Recommendations Corner

The Nebula Award finalists were announced recently, and in the novella category, I’d just like to highlight Hache Pueyo’s But Not Too Bold, which is the more unsettling sentient spider story since Adrian Tchaikovsky. If you like Gothic fiction with a dose of body horror by the side, this one’s for you.

Submissions to the Volume 2 of the IF Anthology of New Indian SFF closed over the weekend. Like last time, we have received around 250 submissions - so you know what I’m going to be doing for a good part of this coming month! Once again, it’s brilliant to see so many people submitting work for an SFF anthology.

The other thing I finished over the weekend was copy-edits to The Fifth Inflection - which means that the novel has now moved to the typesetting stage (I just received sample typesets yesterday). Meanwhile, the Indian version, The Sentence remains on sale here.

What I’m Reading

This book reminded me of one of the reasons why I stopped reading Guy Gavriel Kay a few years ago, after his novels played such a formative part in shaping my teenage world. I picked it up because the thought of a fantasy novel based on the life and deeds of François Villon was an irresistible prospect - especially when you think of Kays' brilliant previous novel, A Song for Arbonne.

But what you get with Written on the Dark is undercooked Joan of Arc fan-fiction, with a clumsy merging of historical periods and rewritten endings, and a love affair that feels like pulling teeth (at least this one lacks . The novel has its moments (especially the intertextual references to Sarantium, which - I think - most long-time Kay readers would agree is his best body of work) - but for the most part, this one is eminently forgettable.

Small mercies - at least its subject matter allowed Kay to steer clear of the inveterate orientalism that creeps in whenever he tries to write about the medieval Muslim world (see Tanvir Ahmed’s brilliant essay here)!

I continued my foray into Greek tragedy - specifically Antigone - with Antigone’s Parallax. As with the Butler book that I discussed in the last edition of the newsletter, this was another convincing argument for considering Antigone in the context of the entire Theban Trilogy, and specifically the dynamics that are initiated in Oedipus. There was also a fascinating section on the role played by funeral rites in the social understanding of death. Beyond that, however, I struggled a bit with this book, because a lot of it is in the very technical language of psycho-analytics, and written in a way that is substantially less accessible than Butler’s work.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

Ada Palmer’s column on why speculative fiction writers are historians has generated some debate online; as the editor of the piece, I am of course neutral on the substantive argument, but it’s worth thinking about. I also enjoyed this piece on rewilding in Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built - a book I have a lot of disagreements with!

Podcast listeners may enjoy the latest Critical Friends episode on style in SFF.

The Indian Scene

Check out Suchitra Sukumar’s short story, ‘Your Body is a Shape of Grief’ in Gone Lawn magazine.

Recommendations Corner

I’m fairly sure I’ve recommended this book at some point in the past, but with Words for Worlds now in its 116th issue, repetition is bound to occur! Anyway, Embassytown is the Delhi Science Fiction Reading Circle’s pick for March, and although Mieville is of course a very popular writer, Embassytown is one of his lesser-known or discussed works. That, to me, is a pity: Embassytown may not have the polish of The City and the City or the put-togetherness of Perdido Street Station or Scar, but in terms of ideas, I think it’s his best work.

Embassytown is a completely original take on one of science fiction’s oldest preoccupations - the relationship between language and the construction of reality, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and so on - the tradition of Samuel L. Delaney and others. At the heart of the novel is a species that is functionally unable to lie - and, therefore, are violently colonised by human beings. This sets up a story at the intersection of first contact and linguistics that is studded with fascinating provocations (although one wishes some of them were a little more developed!).

I’ve spent the last two weeks reading the submissions that have come in so far for Volume 2 of the IF Anthology of New Indian SFF. A reminder: submissions are open until March 1, so you still have two weeks to get your stories in. For submission guidelines, see here.

What I’m Reading

“The melancholy of the antique world seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, all of whom more or less imply that beyond the dark void lies immortality. But for the ancients that “black hole” was infinity itself; their dreams loom and vanish against a background of immutable ebony. No crying out, no convulsions—nothing but the fixity of a pensive gaze. Just when the gods had ceased to be and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone. Nowhere else do I find that particular grandeur.”

– Gustave Flaubert, quoted in the epigraph to Robert Harris’ The Dictator

In Hisham Matar’s The Return, we are told of a character who was sad, but whose sadness had nothing noble in it. We all suffer, and we all strive mightily to convince ourselves that our suffering has the quality of nobility to it, a grandeur that gives it meaning, and elevates our suffering from the mundane to the tragic. And yet, also within our minds, there is a tiny, Puckish imp of doubt that whispers to us that we are fooling ourselves, that all told our suffering is just … ordinary. The voice gnaws away at us, threatening to burst through the seams of the carefully constructed narrative of our lives, and to tear meaning apart.

Departure(s) – Julian Barnes’ last novel (or so he tells us) – is that Puckish voice set down in spare, unsparing prose. Departure(s) takes two of the most enduring subjects of tragedy – love and death – and makes them unbearably ordinary. A young man and a young woman are introduced to each other by the author (Barnes), while all three of them are at Oxford. The two of them (seemingly) fall in love, but instead of marrying, they split up. Forty years later, the man approaches Barnes, and asks him to play matchmaker a second time. He does, to great success: the man and the woman, now in their sixties, become “rekindlers,” and this time they do marry. But this story does not culminate either in an indeterminate happiness, or in the tragedy of separation by death. Instead, the relationship breaks apart a second time, with a whimper, because “his tragedy is that he can love, but that his love cannot be accepted. Her tragedy is that she cannot love, but what she does offer is accepted as love.” But isn’t heartbreak itself a form of tragedy? No, because “then I remembered again that we live in post-tragic times. And I was falling into the temptation of the literary trope.” It is nothing more than a petering-out.

This story is interspersed by Barnes’ own cancer diagnosis, and a slowly dawning realisation that he is approaching the end of his days. And as his time comes, he resists each attempt of his mind (or his heart) to frame his life and death as a tragedy, because the Puckish voice tells him that it would be dishonest to do so. The first of Barnes’ group to pass – Christopher Hitchens – attempted to find solace in noting that “life was ‘thin stuff’, compared to literature.” Barnes’ response is wry disagreement, mixed with the rueful acknowledgment that “maybe this makes dying slightly easier.” Departure(s) makes a choice: to suffer without illusions rather than to suffer with illusions, where the suffering comes from the effort in maintaining the illusion, and the awareness that it is an illusion.

What, then, is one to do? How, indeed, is one to come back from this devastating assessment that Barnes offers up at the beginning of the book, and which the rest of the book is, in some ways, dedicated to demonstrating:

In any case the Tragic Age is long past: we are not grand enough to justify such words. We still use them, to be sure … maybe we haven’t yet found the right words to fit the lesser nature of the post-tragic life.

To some who – in the words of Ghassan Kanafani – cup the world with their hands to make it smaller so that they can be happy – this absence of grandeur suits well enough; but it does not suit Barnes, it does not suit his protagonists (one of whom – the woman – memorably says that “happiness doesn’t make me happy”), and it probably doesn’t suit his readers, at least those who persist until the end. What, then, rescues this work – and this life – from utter nihilism? Towards the end, Barnes gives us a clue, when he muses upon what he would like to do when he dies:

And, just as I shall be rereading great novels for probably the last time, I’d like to make farewell trips to see great art: to Madrid for Las Meninas, Brussels for Bruegel’s Fall of Icarus, Rome for Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, Ghent for the Van Eyck altarpiece, Palermo for Antonello’s Annunciated Madonna, and so on.

When Barnes speaks of “great art” and “great novels”, I suspect that he understands artistic greatness as something that goes beyond the particular, and rises to the level of the universal. And so, in a strange, meandering, way we come back to tragedy: tragedy whose fundamental characteristic – if we are reading Simone Weil or Nicole Loraux – is universalism, something that “grasps and defines human beings not as citizens of a political community but as mortal men and women” (Loraux). And so, perhaps, we come to this partial and unsatisfactory answer, but an answer nonetheless: we may live in a post-tragic age, and we may have not yet found the words for it, but we can still access that sense of universalism, mediated by the art that we have in our world, and to live in and through it. And it is this that makes Barnes’ parting words, where he paints the image of the writer and reader – the last few words that he will give to us in written form – their tender, moving quality:

Instead, I prefer an image of writer and reader on a café pavement in some unidentified town in some unidentified country. Warm weather and a cool drink in front of us. Side by side, we look out at the many and varied expressions of life that pass in front of us. We watch and muse… so, I’ll just rest my hand briefly on your forearm – no, don’t stop looking – and then slip away. No, don’t stop looking.

We won’t.

In 1980s Chile, a young boy grows up in a Santiago suburb, the son of a carefully apolitical pair of parents. One day, his neighbour Raul’s niece – Claudia – recruits him to perform a mysterious task: to watch her uncle, note who visits him, track his movements, and report back to her on his activities. The boy carries out the task faithfully, until one day he sees a young woman visit Raul, and whom he then follows halfway across the city. He reports back to Claudia, but suddenly things seem to have changed: she is no longer interested, and – eventually – tells him that he no longer needs to watch her uncle. That is the last time he sees her.

Years pass. The boy is now a writer, living in downtown Santiago, working on a new novel while slowly – and tentatively – getting back together with his ex-partner, Eme. His novel-in-progress is a thinly fictionalised account of his own childhood – the account that, the reader belatedly learns, was what they were reading in the first section of the book. Or is it? Fiction and reality blur, as one moment Claudia seems to be a character in the narrator’s novel, and the next she steps out of the pages and into his world, returning from a self-imposed exile in the United States upon her father’s death, to kindle a brief, nostalgic, and doomed relationship with the writer. In the course of this reunion, we learn that Raul was not Claudia’s uncle but her father, an anti-Pinochet activist who was forced to assume the identity of his brother in order to escape detection, as he carried out clandestine work for the party – until, at last, the opposition was legalised, he could resume his own identity, and the boy’s services were no longer needed.

But did any of this really happen? Are Raul and Claudia and their family real people, or are they figments of the writer’s imagination, as he seeks to populate his childhood with something that might give it meaning? Does the difference even matter? In 139 taut pages, Alejandro Zambra poses these questions and answers none of them, leaving the readers to seek and find their own closure.

“Sometimes fiction wants to supplant reality,” writes Antonio Munoz Molina in Like a Fading Shadow, “[and] sometimes it settles for adding certain secondary details.” As with Molina’s novel, Ways of Going Home is about our human need to impose coherence, pattern, meaning upon the tattered patchwork that is the sum total of the disaggregated moments of our lives. The writer’s past and present with Claudia can be read at two levels: how life under dictatorship strips and hollows out individual lives, with after-effects that last even once the dictatorship is over; and as an attempt to retrospectively find meaning in a life by weaving it into – to quote Molina gain – a story with “a clear beginning and end, leaving no residues, like cigarettes that leave no cancer.” As the second part of Molina’s quote indicates, however, clean stories, stories without residue, are about as impossible as cigarettes that leave no cancer. Stories, whether real or imagined, will always be messy.

And it is in the act of writing – the effort of imposing meaning – that something vital is lost. This is not quite the same as the familiar argument that language is imprecise, always groping towards a reality that it can never quite capture, and therefore a pale shadow of that reality. This is something slightly different: the idea that designing a pattern will always cast out something that doesn’t fit, or – in Ortega y Gasset’s words – “to define is to exclude and to negate.” To express that sentiment, we have these memorable lines:

… when we write, we wash everything clean, as if by doing so we could advance toward something. We ought to simply describe those sounds, those stains on memory. That arbitrary selection, nothing more. That’s why we lie so much, in the end. That’s why a book is always the opposite of another immense and strange book. An illegible and genuine book that we translate treacherously, that we betray with our habit of passable prose. (p. 125)

So it is that the writer’s relationship with Claudia is a mutual writing of a story that retrofits their childhoods into their present. As the writer notes:

We discover coincidences that bring us back to real life, to our youth, to childhood. Because we can’t, we don’t know how to talk about a movie or a book anymore; the moment has come when movies and novels don’t matter, only the time when we saw them, read them: where we were, what we were doing, who we were then. (p. 83)

But the curious part about this story is that its creators do not see themselves as protagonists – but rather, as secondary characters who simply need to be in a story. This perhaps speaks to a narrowing of horizons under the suffocating atmosphere of a long-lasting, normalised dictatorship: under Pinochet, there are no heroes, only secondary characters who grope their way forwards, engaging – like Raul – in marginal acts of resistance (although even this is revealed to be significantly more noble and courageous than the writer’s own parents, who keep their heads down and do nothing at all). And so the effect of the dictatorship is not only the deaths and the disappearances and the repression, but an imprisonment of the mind, where even the imagination is caged. As the writer notes wryly – in echoes of Walter Benjamin’s lament for the detritus of history:

We are united by a desire to regain the scenes of secondary characters. Unnecessary scenes that were reasonably discarded, and which nonetheless we collect obsessively. (p. 99)

Thus, even what you can retrieve from the wreckage left by the dictatorship are stories of containment. And this is the sense that we are left with, at the end of the novel: a haunting sense of foreclosed possibilities and frustrated horizons, where all that’s left is the narrow ways of going home.

One can certainly concede that desire is radically conditioned without claiming that it is radically determined, and that there are structures that make possible desire without claiming that those structures are impervious to a reiterative and transformative articulation. The latter is hardly a return to “the ego” or classical liberal notions of freedom, but it does insist that the norm has a temporality that opens it to a subversion from within and to a future that cannot be fully anticipated.

Antigone’s Claim departs from popular readings of Sophocles’ Antigone that have posited the play as exploring a conflict between human-made law and natural law, or – more subtly – between the norms of (private) kinship (expressed by Antigone) and the impersonal imperatives of an evolving State-form (expressed by Creon).

Taking Hegel and Lacan’s readings of the play as a counterpoint, Butler argues that Antigone displaces and unsettles accepted notions of kinship, and in doing so, foreshadows (or prefigures?) other, non-normative forms. Butler does so by taking the prohibition of incest as foundational, and noting how, in the descent from Oedipus, the family structures involving Oedipus, Antigone, Ismene, and Haemon are displaced from the heterosexual family norm; thus, Antigone’s determination to bury her “brother” is not simply an articulation of a kin-based love between brother and sister, as Oedipus himself is both “father” and “brother”, which makes Haemon simultaneously “brother” and “nephew.”

Using this, and though a close reading of the play, Butler makes the point that “if kinship is the precondition of the human, then Antigone is the occasion for a new field of the human, achieved through political catachresis, the one that happens when the less than human speaks as human, when gender is displaced, and kinship founders on its own founding laws.” This “new field of the human”, thus, is articulated through the idea of “radical kinship.”

Butler correctly notes that Antigone – of course – does not provide a blueprint for what this might look like; the role of the play is limited to unsettling the normative forms. In a certain sense, it does the work of deconstruction, which – in turn – creates the possibilities for making a new path by walking.

My own reading experience of this book was a mixed one. I have no training in the grammar and language of psycho-analytics, and no familiarity with the work of Lacan. So, there were sections of the book where my eyes glazed over, and where I felt that I simply lacked the analytical tools to make sense of the argument. Despite that, however, I felt that I was able to grasp the book’s core argument (noted above), and in many ways it felt a more persuasive – and exciting – reading of Antigone than the ones that I had previously come across.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

If you are - or ever have been or intend to be - into manga, check out this review of a new book that explores the history of the first century of manga, the Japanese art forms it evolved from, its periodisation, and much else.

The Indian Scene

Yesterday, I spoke at an event to celebrate the publication of Earthbound, an anthology of climate fiction edited by Alina Gufran. Earthbound consists of a set of stories, most set in a near-future India, in the context of climate change, the climate crisis, and all that it will bring (and has already brought). The familiar settings and unfamiliar events lend a sense of the uncanny/weird to these stories, a defamiliarising effect that is unique to the genre. They are also striking for their treatment of the impact of the climate crisis on specifically existing social fault-lines (such as caste, class and gender), and for some (bleak) extrapolation along those lines.

You can get your copies here, and at bookshops (Midland, if you’re in Delhi).

It’s also worth noting that Earthbound adds to the growing climate fiction literature out of South Asia: see, for example, Varun Mathew’s The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay, Saad Z. Hossain’s Cyber Mage, Gigi Ganguly’s Biopeculiar, and some of the stories in the Gollancz Anthology of South Asian Science Fiction and The IF Anthology of New Indian SFF, Vol. 1. This is now something of a tradition, and I sense that we’re going to see a lot more of such stories in the near future.

Recommendations Corner

This coming Sunday, the Delhi Science Fiction Reading Circle is reading Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Alien Clay. Tchaikovsky is, of course, one of the most famous science fiction writers active today (The Children of Time series), but as with all writers who are prolific, there are parts of his backlist that have fallen off the map a little. One of these books is, for me, his best work: The Doors of Eden. The novel spans multiple timelines where the evolutionary tree branches off and sentient life evolves (its nature and form determined by the epoch it is in), and the story moves in and among these epochs. This beautiful novel also has one of the most beautiful lines I’ve read about the ineffable: “There are shades of qualities your language does not accommodate.”

I spent the second half of the month in Kerala, first at the Kerala Literature Festival, and then at the Kochi Biennale. I am not, in general, a fan of the literature festival “circuit” - for reasons that should be obvious enough - but KLF has always felt different. It feels an entirely organic part of the city, it is very non-manicured, entry is free, and the people seem to genuinely want to be there for the books. It’s an experience I’d recommend to everyone, if you can get yourselves to Calicut in the third week of January. This year, I had a lovely session with Cornelia Funke - whose books were a regular sight in the children’s section of bookshops in my teenage years (this was before “YA” became a thing). We ended up talking a lot about speculative fiction and the non-human world.

It was also my first visit to the Biennale, and I loved it. There’s something about the way in which the Biennale distributes its exhibits across various locations in Fort Kochi - from warehouses to cafes to heritage buildings to metro stations - that makes you feel that this is how art should be accessed: decentralised, varied, and woven into the fabric of the urban landscape you’re in. As with KLF, it felt like a very intentional rebuke to the practice - for too common - of separating literature and art from its environs, and something that really spoke to me. Specifically, the use of warehouses - and the nature of the exhibits in them - reminded me of Walter Benjamin’s focus on the detritus - the broken things - of history, and how good art is often an excavation of that detritus.

The Biennale is on until 31 March, so if you can get yourself to Kochi by then, you absolutely should.

What I’m Reading

Continuing to wind my way through my World Book Fair finds, I read Anarchy’s Brief Summer, a mosaic-style work that tells the story of the Spanish Civil War through the life and death of one its most famous and enigmatic figures, the anarchist commander Buenaventura Durruti, as seen through the eyes of his confidantes, friends, lover, and intellectual and political rivals. Each chapter - which corresponds to a phase of the Civil War - begins with a nostalgic, almost elegiac framing section by the writer, which sets the context, and then proceeds through fragments of essays, letters, speeches, and other historical records authored by the people around Durruti.

It makes for a fascinating approach - not quite a novel, but not quite non-fiction either, and it works brilliantly: you get a sense of the same history that you’ve read before - the initial triumph of the anarchists, the bitter debates around cooperating with the republican government in a popular front against the fascists, the reversals at the front, the resurgence in Barcelona, the final fall, and then the long afterlives - but told almost in the present tense, as its unfolding, and from a variety of perspectives.

The overwhelming feeling I had on reading Anarchy’s Brief Summer was about the astonishing radicalism of the Spanish Revolution, especially compared with the narrowness of political horizons today. Because the book is a mosaic of primary sources, we are given a window into the intellectual debate at the moment of its formation, and of its apogee. And the efforts of the Spanish anarchists to fundamentally reimagine the foundations of the world, beyond the confines of the economic/political structures that seem to be entirely immovable and unshakeable today, was both inspiring - but also deeply saddening, because compared to what they had then, the intellectual life of today seems a wasteland, at best.

Perhaps the task, then - to go back to Benjamin - is indeed one of excavation.

I read Asef Bayat’s Revolution Without Revolutionaries alongside Anarchy’s Brief Summer, and reading the two books together almost gave me whiplash in moments. Revolution without Revolutionaries is a diagnosis of the Arab Spring revolutions of the 2010s (focusing specifically on Egypt), and while Anarchy’s Brief Summer was all about the expansive and liberatory vision of the Spanish anarchists of the 1930s, Revolution without Revolutionaries depicts how decades of neoliberalism had effectively made it impossible to even imagine visions of that kind any more.

Bayat coins the clarifying term “refolution” to describe the Arab Spring:

What came to fruition then looked like revolution in terms of mobilization but like reform in terms of change. These revolutions were reformist in the sense that the protagonists who spearheaded masterful mobilization were unable to imagine forms of organizing and governance that departed from those against which they were rebelling; they were unable, unwilling, or uninterested in directing the process of change within state institutions; they conceptually separated the economy from those aspects of the political order that they sought to topple; and they hardly offered any exploration of how state power worked or how to transform it.

The reason for this - he argues - lies in the intellectual and material exhaustion of the great revolutionary impulses of the 1970s - anti-colonial nationalism, Marxism, and Islam - that had been the driving forces behind revolutions in Palestine, Yemen, many parts of Latin America, and (most successfully) in Iran. By the 2010s, however, the grammar and vocabulary of these movements had been replaced by the language of neoliberalism, and emptied of substantive content. This - at least in some part - was responsible for the ultimate “failure” of these “refolutionary” movements.

As someone who came to adulthood watching the Arab Spring in real time, and as someone who has always been fascinated by it in its afterlives, I found the argument persuasive (if depressing!). But the part of the book I found most fascinating was Bayat’s account of the 1979 Iranian revolution (which he was an active participant in, as a left-wing college student). I learned, for the first time, that in the initial months of the revolution, there were strong and deep liberatory impulses, across a range of domains - the rights and freedoms of women, the rights of workers, of students, and participation in directly democratic structures. In fact, in many factories, workers actually took control of the production, and began to self-organise; something similar happened in universities.

Eventually, all of this was brutally stamped out (universities were closed down by the regime for two years, for example) and then snuffed out with the advent of the decade-long Iraq-Iran war. But Bayat’s book gives a fascinating - and elegiac - window into what the revolution might have become (and therefore, perhaps, what someday it could still become, even though - to come back to a line from Anarchy’s Brief Summer - “you can’t have the same revolution twice.”)

Yet another World Book Fair find: I bought this out of my interest in Gramsci, and because I like novels that shift between eras. I was disappointed. Insofar as the book is set in 1930s Italy, and tells us of Gramsci’s last years, it’s a gripping read; but when, every chapter, it shifts to the present day, tracing a rather insipid German professor’s quest to recover a “lost” Gramsci manuscript while navigating the wreckage of an unsuccessful marriage, it was tedious in the extreme.

I must say, that although I have a very small sample size, I don’t know what it is with Germans and terrible writing about sex and romantic relationships. I loved Jenny Erpenbeck’s End of Days, but Kairos - my god! - 287 pages about a tedious relationship between a 19-year-old woman and a 54-year-old man (why!). And here too. If you’re a Gramsci obsessive, get this book, but otherwise give it a miss, honestly.

If you’d give me a gap year with no responsibilities, money to go with it, and tell me that I could use it to study anything I want, I’d enrol in a classics programme. Throughout my life, I’ve had tantalising access to flavours from this bouquet: in college I read English translations of the Greek plays; in various cities in the world I’ve gotten to watch performances (including one in ancient Greek) of some of the more famous representatives of the canon, such as Antigone; I spent a year while at Oxford auditing various courses on Greek and Roman literature; I’ve come at them obliquely through other writers (such as Ismail Kadare), and so on. I’ve just never been able to study the classics systematically.

Much like my previous forays, I came to Nicole Loraux’s The Mourning Voice without planning: I came across the book through Alberto Toscano, whom people probably know better as a scholar of fascism. But as always, I loved what I did find. In The Mourning Voice, Loraux essentially argues that - contrary to the prevailing views at the time that she wrote - tragedy in classical Athens performed what she calls an “anti-political” function: that is, it was a vehicle to express sentiments, emotions, and ideas that were contrary to the dominant ideology of the city-state, and which could not be expressed in political life. Loraux demonstrates this in a fascinating way: by focusing closely on a unique feature of Greek theatre, the chorus, on the lyrical nature of the plays (as opposed to the content of what is being said), and on the non-verbal as opposed to the verbal. She argues that without paying close attention to these essential features of Greek tragedy, you cannot fully understand what it is doing, who it is speaking to, and what it is speaking for.

In the process, Loraux reads afresh - and reads against the grain - some of the classics that I thought I knew somewhat well - Antigone, Elektra, Trojan Women etc - and completely reorients our understanding of these plays, and the context in which they were performed. The close reading is an absolute delight to follow (even though the sheer granular detail sometimes makes it hard), and in the process you understand not only the plays themselves, but also the world in which they were performed.

The book reminded me of two of my favourite works: Adam Parry’s essay, “The Two Voices of Virgil’s Aeneid,” which argues that The Aeneid has both a “public” voice - the familiar celebration of Rome’s greatness - but also, in an undercurrent, a private voice, which is more uncertain, more elegiac, and questions some of the normative frames that the public voice celebrates. And the second is Lila Abu-Lughod’s Veiled Sentiments, which shows how Bedouin women use poetry to express the subversive and anti-patriarchal sentiments that they cannot express in more regular, “prose” conversation in the public sphere. As with those two books, The Mourning Voice brings to us the unique joy of immersing ourselves in the delightful open-textured character of literature, and the beauty of discovering all that literature can do and be, in creating, shaping, and nurturing an expansive life.

This has been a fortnight of heavy books, but this had to be the heaviest: a short history of 20th century Nigeria, from the colonial era to the present-day, covering eras that I knew something about previously (such as the Biafran War, which I’d read about in Achebe’s work), but also those which I had only a vague sense of (the murder of Ken Saro-Wiva and the brutalities of the Shell Oil Company in the Niger River Delta). There are things you know about the corporation-state nexus in the abstract, but reading about the details, stripped of everything, recounted in a detached, almost objective tone - the burned villages, the torture and the mass murder, the wholesale destruction of lives - that hits very differently. I wish I could say that there was a sliver of redemption or hope that came through in this book, but there isn’t - and that, I suppose, is life without illusions.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

In the fourth week of January, Strange Horizons publishes a special issue dedicated to criticism in SF (the only SF magazine to do so). Personally, it’s one of my favourite issues of the year, and here is the 2026 version, with some gems.

The Indian Scene

Submissions call: Submissions remain open for Volume 2 of the IF Anthology of New Indian Speculative Fiction, throughout February. The last date is March 1, so you have this month to submit. Submit here.

Submissions are also open this month for a special issue of Tassavur Magazine, edited by Abhijeet Sathe. Submit here.

Recommendations Corner

On the subject of the classics, one of the favourite enterprises of fantasy writers has been to “retell” the classics. And ten years before Circe, there was Lavinia, which remains my favourite of such attempts. When it comes to subverting dominant normative frames, and doing so in the most subtle - yet more uncompromising - of ways, there is nobody like Ursula Le Guin, and Lavinia feels like The Aeneid’s private voice being brought to life. It’s not amongst Le Guin’s better-known works, so if you haven’t yet come across it - what better time than now!

This past week, the World Book Fair has been on in New Delhi. Visiting the World Book Fair has been an annual ritual for almost three decades (at least, the years I’ve been in Delhi). As a child, my parents would take me there (if memory serves me right, in the 1990s it happened once every two years; now, it’s annual). Back then, the Scholastic and Bloomsbury stalls were the main attractions for an eight-year-old. In 2000, I recall getting a hardback of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (childhood indiscretions, I judge myself for it now) before it was available in Indian bookshops. The World Book Fair was one of the most magical places in my little child’s world. Lunch at an outdoor food stall in between hall-hopping didn’t hurt the mystique either.

Decades have passed. Books are now much more easily available, whether through ordering via your local bookshop or - where that’s not possible - online. Meanwile, some of the buildings that housed the Book Fair at Pragati Maidan have been torn down. The Book Fair itself has shrunk. Its character has changed. It has become a lot more “governmentalised,” if that’s a word. With that, for many people, the magic has gone. To an extent, that’s true; and yet, something remains. My go-to places have changed from Scholastic and Bloomsbury to Aakar Books and Speaking Tiger (among others). Still there are things you chance upon at the World Book Fair that you simply won’t elsewhere. I always come back home with my fingers aching from holding multiple bags from multiple stalls. And, come what may, there will always be a sprinkling of magic dust in a huge hall with books in all directions, and people among the books.

This year, as always, I came back with a stash - which I will go through in the coming weeks, and talk about it here.

On another note, happy 24th Birthday to Blossoms Bookshop. Its massive second-hand collection made it the most important place in my life between the ages of 17-22, when I was reading for my undergraduate degree in Bangalore. So if you’re reading this, and you’re Bangalorean, drop by and support one of its most venerable institutions.

What I’m Reading

Anyone who has followed this newsletter for a while knows that I am fascinated by the life and work of Victor Serge. Ever since I read the stunning Unforgiving Years many decades ago, I have tried to read everything I can by - and about - him (a project facilitated by NYRB republishing a lot of his novels). As an artist, as an anarchist, and as a person, my view of him is - I think - a view shared by many others: deep respect, tinged with admiration, primarily for a man with moral integrity, who refused to compromise on it, and who paid a staggering price for his refusal.

I came across Unruly Revolutionary through a Boston Review interview with the author, Mitchell Abidor. As the title - Turncoat Radical - suggested, the interview promised to upend this widely held view about Serge. After reading it, I came across the book itself at the World Book Fair. I bought it with some trepidation: I was expecting revelations that would create the kind of jarring dissonance I felt when I read Patti Smith casually talking about playing a “harmony” concert in Tel Aviv in the 1990s. Never meet your heroes - and never find out too much about them either.

This impression is fortified when you read the book’s introduction, where Abidor is almost apologetic about what follows. And yet, the book itself is not quite near the character deconstruction that the interview suggests. To start with, let me note that it is an excellent biography: rigorous, detailed, excellently written, and - as biographies of such figures should do - crystallises the era in the person, and the person in the era.

Now, as for Serge himself: the book does not so much deconstruct him as much as it humanises him. Abidor does an excellent work of setting the context through which a lot of Serge’s writing and actions - which might otherwise seem inconsistent - make sense. What emerges is - in anarchism’s classic formulation - “neither a god nor a master,” but a human being with all his human flaws - flaws that are accentuated and amplified because of the nature of the times in which Serge lived. Thus, we do not excuse - for example - his support of the bloody suppression by the Soviet Union of the Kronstadt Rebellion, but we can understand it - an understanding that is informed by his subsequent and public change of a view, a change that he paid a high price for.

The most serious charge that Abidor claims to lay against Serge is that towards the end of his life, he became not just anti-Stalinist but anti-communist, to the point where - akin to George Orwell - he was involved in making lists and reflexively supporting the US. Unlike Orwell, however, Serge died in 1947 (an early death, hastened by privation and exile). At the time he died, institutional and governmental communism was Stalinism: other variants had been stamped out. From the vantage point of 2025, we can distinguish the two, but in 1945, that would have been a much more difficult task. At the time, even McCarthyism had not yet entered the picture. One thing about Serge that this book brings out very clearly is his ability to change his mind as the reality around him changed. With that quality, there is no reason to believe that, confronted with reality of the Cold War, and of the militant decolonisation movements that swept the world in the 1950s and 1960s, Serge would not have changed his mind again - I rather believe he would have.

We will never know, but perhaps Abidor here is a victim of his own success: the portrait he paints of Serge is so nuanced and - despite everything - sympathetic, that both at his best and at his worst, he is a figure that we can continue to admire as quintessentially human, and bearing the best of human courage as well as (on occasion) the worst of human short-sightedness - but never human evil.

For that alone, and for everything else, this is a book worth reading.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

Take a look at the Feminist Futurisms round-table - from last year’s WorldCon - featuring some known and familiar names.

The Indian Scene

Submissions for Volume 2 of the IF Anthology of New Indian SFF are still open. Submit your story here.

Recommendations Corner

Last Sunday, for the Delhi Science Fiction Reading Circle, we had a lot of fun talking about Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light. Apart from the utterly chaotic nature of that book, as I (re-)read it, I thought to myself that it really was a fantasy novel trapped in the science fiction form. And that made me remember Zelazny’s actual (serialised) high fantasy novel, The Chronicles of Amber, which hasn’t quite enjoyed the kind of resurgence some other books from that era have had. This is a pity, because reading that book was sheer joy, the kind of joy that high fantasy should give you. I still recall the grandeur of the opening scene, where characters are introduced like the dramatis personae of a Shakespearean drama, the scenes of dream-travel, which are Zelazny at his best, and which Jordan would use to great effect in Wheel of Time a few years later, and the twin themes of war-and-quest that Zelazny completely nails. I will need to re-read the book to see how well it holds up (I was a teenager when I first read it), but if you’re someone who hasn’t yet read it, I wish you the joy of first discovery.

Earlier this week, I did an interview with The Hindustan Times’ Manjula Narayan, for her Authors and Books Podcast, focusing primarily on the IF Anthology of New Indian SFF, the process of putting it together, the nature of the stories that we look for, and the state of contemporary Indian SFF in general. You can watch it here (or listen to it on your preferred podcast platform). And remember, submissions for Volume 2 of the anthology remain open until March 1 (submit here).

This Saturday, I’ll be in conversation with Bora Chung about magical realism and speculative fiction in East and South Asia. It’s not a crossover I’d have predicted, but one that I am quite excited about. The conversation is online - 5PM IST - and you can sign up by scanning the QR code in the poster here.

Writing update: I did finally finish the edits to THE FIFTH INFLECTION, and sent them to Sareena Kamath, my editor at Saga Press. The novel’s now gone into production, and it’s all hands on deck again, back to working the sequel.

Finally, a small landmark: over the new year, this newsletter crossed 3,000 subscribers. I’m very grateful to all of you who take the time out to read, and hopefully, from time to time, this newsletter has helped you discover books that you’ve loved!

What I’m Reading

I ended 2025 with Alba de Cespedes’ Her Side of the Story. After my mid-year journey through Elsa Morante’s Lies and Sorcery, this was my second tragic bildungsroman novel set in mid-20th century Italy, focusing intensely on women’s lives, their rich interiority, their friendships, and confrontations with patriarchy in the context of a violently changing world. Both Lies and Sorcery and Her Side of the Story presage themes that you can later find in Elena Ferrante, and it’s of little surprise that Ferrante herself acknowledges her debt to these two writers.

In fact, some of the early parts of Her Side of the Story - set in a tenement complex in Rome - reminded me of the brilliant HBO TV adaptation of Ferrante, in how it communicated the suffocating atmosphere in these tenements, and of the patriarchal violence that lurks just underneath the facade of forced marital and familial civility:

In the apartment above ours, the one next to it, the modern white buildings rising up beside ours – in all the buildings in Rome, all the buildings in the world, I saw women awake in the dark, behind the unscalable walls of men’s shoulders.

Early on in the novel, the protagonist’s mother - caught between an unhappy marriage she cannot escape from, and a love affair that she cannot escape into, dies by suicide; this event shapes the protagonist’s own life, her relationship with her father, and the emptiness of her own marriage. Meanwhile, Italy has entered World War II, the protagonist’s husband is a part of the resistance and is imprisoned, driving her to join the resistance as well - in the hope that through militant action, she will come to understand her husband better.

Her Side of the Story is a novel of permanent deferral: the novel’s women protagonists confront and struggle against patriarchy and violence in the hope that the barrier immediately before them (whether a loveless marriage or fascism) is the last barrier that they have to overcome before they can find something resembling happiness. But that happiness appears to be permanently deferred, always beyond the next barrier, and the next, and the next.

At times, this results in what appears to be a frustrating lack of agency on part of the characters (for example, the protagonist’s natural curiosity, love for reading, and ability to put herself in danger are at odds with the passivity with which she approaches decisions that have to do with her marriage, including her decision to join the resistance) - but perhaps that is the entire point:

In other words, you had to accept that you couldn’t be a hero or play a leading role. And I would have to accept my marriage, the loneliness it brought with it, its decline, the end of the romantic plan through which we had invented ourselves.

At the same time, however, I did not read Her Side of the Story as a novel about defeatism - far from it. Throughout the story, there are cracks in the edifice that let the light in - even though the form of that light is as much wont to illuminate as it is to blind.

It is fascinating to read Lies and Sorcery, Her Side of the Story, and The Neapolitan Quartet together. Between them, these books chronologically cover most of 20th-century Italy, and thinking of them together lets you see both the incremental, crawlingly slow progress in women’s agency through the course of the century, but also - and at the same time - the constraints, traps, and nightmares that persist generation upon generation. In each of these books you find the violent clash between the richness and complexity of these women’s interior landscape, and the structures of a world that have been designed to snuff it out - with varying outcomes.

It is probably the spectacular success of Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet that has brought Morante and Cespedes’ work back into the public eye, and into the consciousness of readers (like me) who’d otherwise have been unlikely to come across them. For that - as for so much else - we have a lot to thank Elena Ferrante for.

Alejandro Zambra’s Not to Read is, on first glance, a disparate collection of critical work: reviews, essays, and reflections on writing. Taken by themselves, the individual pieces are deeply enjoyable: the style is reminiscent of some of the fragmentary, episodic writings of Eduardo Galeano, there is a dry, biting, and sometimes caustic - but never ungenerous - wit, and you get to learn about an entire set of Latin American writers that the “Boom” does not normally consider. Zambra has no time for literary canons, and that is something that makes this book unique.

More than that, however, as you read, certain themes emerge. Zambra is deeply skeptical of literary establishments, and of literature as a profession. Manuel Puig, he writes, has created “a literature outside of literature, of an oeuvre that is simultaneously legible and inscrutable, one that calls the nature of the literary into question.” In one of the most memorable essays in the collection - on Pedro Lembel - he writes: “his work was forged in the night, in the barrio, in life and not in literature.” There are traces here of Joseph Andras. Still later, he writes: “Ribeyro writes to live, not to demonstrate that he has lived.” And perhaps, towards the end, the kicker:

Books say no to literature. Some. Others, the majority, say yes. They obey the market or the holy spirit of governments. Or the placid idea of a generation. Or the even more placid idea of a tradition. I prefer books that say no. Sometimes, even, I prefer the books that don’t know what they are saying.

Reading this, you get the sense that for Zambra, the phrase “full-time writer” would be a contradiction in terms: you cannot write without the stuff of life, and that comes from living.

The mirror of this is another theme that shines through the essays: for all his humour and wit, Zambra takes writing - and the practice of writing - very seriously. Early on, he writes of a compatriot: “I want us to have writers like him again: forthright, committed, beautiful, forever young, cultured, generous, loud-mouthed.” The word choice - especially the words that I have italicised - seems significant. Again, on Pedro Lembel, he notes that Lembel “reminds us that literature is not offensive, that it’s not mere decoration, that it does something to society. To give him the [Nobel] prize would be to honour that. It would be, I think, a collective prize.”

This is not a call, of course, for didacticism; Zambra is, again, careful with his words, and “does something to society” is not prescriptive about what that “something” should be. But that is not to say, either, that this is an amoral practice. Zambra’s “philosophy” of writing - or perhaps it would be better to say that the meaning he seeks in and through writing - is - echoing Vaclav Havel - to:

… find oneself with the weight of words, to reconquer their necessity, search incessantly, even when they – the words – have become ever more transitory, more perishable, more erasable than ever.

So you can read this book at multiple levels: as an insight into the craft of reviewing and of criticism; as a guide to a collection of Latin American writers that you might not instantly find displayed in a bookshop; but above all else, I think, a reflection on how even within “th[is] pile of debris … [that] grows skyward,” writing remains necessary.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

Check out the latest edition of the Critical Friends podcast, on cozy horror.

The Indian Scene

Run Along the Shelves has a very nice review of the IF Anthology of New Indian SFF, picking out some of the stories they particularly liked (here; and to get the anthology, here).

Recommendations Corner

Ahead of my weekend panel, I read Red Sword, which is perhaps the most science fiction-y of Bora Chung’s work (the others are horror/magical realism-adjacent collections, I’d say). Red Sword is a very spare, very minimalistic novel about a group of conscript-soldiers caught between the nameless Empire that enlists them and the existing colonisers of the planet that they are meant to snatch back for the Empire. It’s a straightforward enough story until a few twists at the very end; and the blurb says that it is meant to be an allegory of the 16th-18th century wars between the Russian Empire and Qing Dynasty China, in which the latter used conscripted Korean soldiers.

In an interesting review in Locus, Niall Harrison finds the spareness of the novel its most attractive characteristic, with the allegorical theme a bit of a distraction. I had a bit of an opposite reaction; like Harrison, I do not know enough of the history to tell if this really is an allegory or not, but for me the story truly came alive at the end, when a smidgen of narrative depth was added to the schematic conflict that had been depicted thus far. Read it and make up your minds for yourselves!

A quick note to say the submissions for Volume 2 of the Between Worlds Anthology of New Indian SFF are open, and the deadline is March 1, 2026. For guidelines, and the submission link, see here.

Writing update: I’m finishing the year with wrapping up my edits for the US edition of The Sentence (now titled The Fifth Inflection). Publication is still a year or so away, but I should have more details on that in the coming months. It has been a bit of a surreal year: in January, after around five years of querying, I found a literary agent; in April, we “went on sub”; at the end of May, there was an offer from Saga Press; in October, the novel won the Ignyte Award; and one year on, I’m finishing edits and working on the sequel to the The Sentence/The Fifth Inflection, with some more stuff in the pipeline for 2026. I write about some part of that writing/publishing journey - which culminated in 2025 - in a previous issue of the newsletter, here.

Now for the annual round-up of the books that I read this year. Some of these I’ve reviewed separately on my blog, and I’ve linked to those reviews below; shorter reviews of all these books can be found in previous issues of this newsletter.

I began 2025 with two books at the intersection of poetry, history, politics, and revolution. Samuel Hodgkin’s Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism told the story of how Persian poetry constituted a glue that bound together a number of decolonisation projects in the mid-20th Century, in central and South Asia. From Iran to India to the USSR to the central Asian republics, Persian poetry provided a cultural vocabulary and a grammar that diverse peoples could use to talk to each other - a grammar that was eclipsed as the USSR eventually turned it into a top-down, State-led project. Eric Calderwood’s On Earth or in Poems: the Many Lives of al-Andalus movingly chronicled how, centuries after the fall of the Kingdom of Granada, al-Andalus has lived on in history, memory, legend, and as an anchor for radical political projects, including in Palestine. Al-Andalus has fascinated me ever since I came across it as a teenager in a fantasy novel by Guy Gavriel Kay, and I loved reading this book. In summer, I would re-read the book wandering through Andalusia, in the squares of Granada, in a tea-house in Cordoba, and by the corniche in Cadiz.

In July, I read Michael Craig Hillman’s part-biography, part-literary analysis in A Lonely Woman: Forough Forroukhzad and her Poetry. I had previously read Forroukhzad’s poems in a scattered way, but this book did a wonderful job not only of setting them in context, but also in illuminating Forroukhzad’s own poetic and personal development through these poems, in the context of mid-20th century Iran under the rule of the Shah. The book is a window into what rebellion through poetry might mean in a society where other modes of rebellion are closed off, and it forever altered my reading of the beautiful - and unsettling - Conquest of the Garden.

On a similar theme, the month after, I read Whitney Chadwick’s The Militant Muse: Love, War and the Women of Surrealism, my annual find at Budapest’s matchless National Gallery Bookshop. This book chronicles the intense relationships between women surrealist artists in the mid-20th century, who confronted both the travails of World War II as well as the patriarchal art world. I discovered new things about the lives and loves of artists like Frida Kahlo, and I discovered new artists entirely, such as Claude Cahun (“True poetry, the kind that keeps its secret … is like the paving stone … that can be used by the revolutionaries rather than the police.”) The fictional complement to this book was Lucy Steeds’ The Artist, which is one of the best novels I read this year: the story of a young woman in early-20th-century Provence, who dreams of being an impressionist artist, and struggles against the strictures imposed by her reclusive uncle, whom she lives with, and who actually is a famous artist. Rarely have I come across a novel with as narratively perfect an ending as this one.

On the topic of art and the novel, and hopping from France to Italy: the dazzlingly unpredictable Laurent Binet’s latest novel, Perspectives, is set in renaissance Italy with Michelangelo as a character, and is a historical-detective novel that moves through the world of renaissance art. Binet is as virtuoso as ever as a novelist, with shades of The Name of the Rose in this novel (long-time Binet readers will be unsurprised, given that Umberto Eco himself is a character in The Seventh Function of Language). I was told by someone with impeccable taste that they found the ending a let-down; I’m not so sure!

Still on the same theme, and back to non-fiction, in February, at the World Book Fair in Delhi, I chanced upon Jacopo Galimberti’s Images of Class: Operaismo, Autonomia, and the Visual Arts - a dense, complex, and ultimately rewarding book about how the the post-war, militant left-wing political movements in Italy gave rise to an entire genre of art, from the visual to the aural to the architectural, and how these artists struggled to craft a vision of what it means to be - and to make - radical art within the constraints of a capitalist world. Set in the same era, Luigi Pintor’s Memories from the Twentieth Century: A Kind of Trilogy is a set of political montages and reflections of radical movements and their limits. These books fortified my view that Italy from the end of the War to the conclusion of the Years of Lead is one of the most fascinating places to read about, if you’re interested in radical politics and art.

Ah, the Italians! More than a decade ago, I read Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, and it changed my life. It turns out that Ferrante was just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Italian women writers writing the most intense, the most visceral, and most unforgiving bildungsroman novels about womanhood, revolt, and patriarchal and political tyranny. In summer, I read Elsa Morante’s 800-page, three-generations-spanning Lies and Sorcery, which left me raw. Barely had the wounds closed when I decided to finish the year with Alba de Cespedes’ Her Side of the Story, set in the years before and during World War II, with the protagonist a blend of a Ferrante and a Morante character, whose travails in the resistance and in a love-starved marriage leave you with alternating feelings of rage and helplessness, until a late sting in the tail leaves you not knowing what to think at all; I’m still navigating my feelings about this book.

My one day in Barcelona in summer, half of which was spent in an anarchist walking tour, finally drove me to start reading the Spanish Civil War and Spanish anarchist history books that I have long been procrastinating on. Danny Evans’ Revolution and the State: Anarchism in the Spanish Civil War is a fascinating account of the anarchist perspective in the revolution, of the anarchist movement’s valiant - and ultimately doomed - attempts to avoid co-option in the effort of republican State reconstruction that was ongoing even as Franco’s fascists were at the gates of Barcelona. This is a detailed and granular history. Meanwhile, Mark Bray’s The Anarchist Inquisition: Assassins, Activists, and Martyrs in Spain and France takes the longer view, starting with the “propaganda of the deed” that began in the late-19th century, and going on to discuss the anarchist movements in the early 20th century, culminating with Barcelona’s “tragic week” in 1909. The book starts with an immortal line about terrorism and human rights being the two fractious siblings born out of the 20th century, and only gets better from there. In between these two I read Serge Pay’s little gem, Treasures of the Spanish Civil War, a set of interconnected reflections and anecdotes about the revolution, the war, and the aftermath, set in spare and haunting prose.

Still on the theme of anarchism, but moving away from Spain, Kavitha Rao’s Spies, Lies, and Allies: the Extraordinary Lives of Chatto and Roy is a fantastic account of a certain moment in Indian revolutionary history, and which really should be a lot better known, and read by a lot more Indians, than it currently is. I also discovered at the book fair Ngo Van’s In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary, which tells the little-known story of the radical Vietnamese revolutionaries who were persecuted both by the colonial powers and by Ho Chi Minh’s party, because of their anarchist views - a necessary corrective to the otherwise brilliant (and seductive) works such as Joseph Andras’ Faraway the Southern Sky, which I had read last year. It once again convinced me that the revolutionary movements of early and mid-20th century east and south-east Asia (Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia) are some of the most fascinating to have ever been - and their almost total erasure a tragedy. On the subject of Vietnam, I read Salar Mohendesi’s brilliant Red Internationalism, which chronicles the rise of the anti-war Vietnam movement, the global solidarities that it created, and how - ultimately and ironically - the victory of the Vietnam led to its fracture and ultimate co-optation of the language of anti-imperialism by the language of human rights, actively promoted by the United States as a legitimation strategy. After reading this book, you’ll never quite be able to look at the concept of human rights the same way.

Another revolutionary movement that has long fascinated me has been the Ethiopian students’ movement that overthrew emperor Haile Selassie - but was then co-opted and ultimately destroyed by the military regime of the Derg. This summer, I read two excellent book about that history. Baalu Girma’s Oromay - only recently translated - is a haunting novel about the political repression that followed after the victory of the Derg. Elleni Centime Zeleke’s Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964-2016 interrogates the radicalism of the students’ movement - and its long legacy, for good and for ill, that still informs contemporary Ethiopia. This is one of the best books of critical non-fiction that I read this year.

Patti Smith is a writer I’ve always wanted to read more of, ever since I read her beautiful eulogy for Sam Shepard; this year I finally did so, reading her memoirs Just Kids (about her life as a young artist and musician in the New York of the 1960s and her love story with Robert Mapplethorpe) and Bread of Angels (about her childhood, her life with her husband Fred Smith, and her rebuilding of her music career after Smith’s death). I found Bread of Angels - especially the bits about domestic life - a little patchy, but Just Kids - whew! Patti Smith has an ear for the rhythm and the music of words - and for the movement of the sentence - that is simply extraordinary.

As always, I read a lot of science fiction this year, with mixed results. Alastair Reynolds’ Century Rain - doubling up as an alt-world SF novel and a love letter to Paris - was my stand-out read, the best Reynolds I’ve read (and that’s saying something, as he’s my favourite SF writer active today). I was not overly impressed by the Clarke Award shortlist, with Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time perhaps being my favourite in the shortlist. I bookended my year with two two Adrian Tchaikovsky novels - Alien Clay and Bee Keeper - that had all kinds of weird and unsettling biological speculation, in the classic Tchaikovsky mold. And one of my favourite genre reads was a book that’s not been published yet, but is forthcoming in 2026: I was asked to write a blurb for Mahmud El Sayed’s The Republic of Memory, a book that brings together two of my favourite themes that I never thought I’d see crossed over: a generation spaceship, and the 2011 Egyptian Revolution! Watch out for this one when it’s released in the Fall.

Among the unclassifiable books that I read this year: Sonallah Ibrahim’s Ice, a novel about an Arab student’s time in the Soviet Union in that most consequential of all years, 1973; Venus Ghata-Khoury’s The Last Days of Mandelstam and Dominique Noguez’s The Three Rimbauds: one imagines Osip Mandelstam’s final days, and the other imagines a world in which Rimbaud did not die, but became a member of the French literary establishment; Julie Lekstrom Hime’s Mikhail and Margarita which, sticking to the Soviet theme, (fictionally) reconstructs Bulgakov writing his novel in the climate of censorship and disappearances (Mandelstam plays a part here too); Kaouther Adimi’s A Bookshop in Algiers, a novel about how an Algiers bookshop played a part in the war for Independence, before falling into disuse, disrepair and - ultimately - destruction; Dubravka Ugresic’s A Muzzle for Witches, an absolutely wonderful memoir - written towards the end of her life - of the relationship between nationalism, literature, and women’s writing; on a similar theme, and also a last memoir, Eduardo Galeano’s The Hunter of Stories; Alejandro Zambra’s delicious, ironic, and bitingly witty collection of essays on literary criticism and the Latin American novel, Not to Read (come for the Neruda barbs, stay for discovering writers you didn’t know you needed to read); Julio Llamazares’ The Yellow Rain, a Pedro Paramo-esque novel where an atmosphere of loneliness and death creeps up on you so quietly that you don’t even notice it until the moment that it thoroughly disorients you; Han Kang’s We Do Not Part (probably the most famous novel in this list!) which I really don’t have much to say about that hasn’t been said already, other than that I loved it; and finally, one of my favourite novels of the year, John Williams’ Stoner, which has the finest and most moving treatment of death that I’ve ever read in fiction.

These are not all the novels I read this year, but they form a significant portion of them. Reviews of the ones I read most recently will be forthcoming in the first January 2026 issue of the newsletter. I hope that some of these books pique your interest, and that you find them to be the compelling and magical companions that I did this year.

To the writers who read this newsletter, I wish you a 2026 where words are kind to you; and to the readers, I hope 2026 brings you many more books that - as Kafka said - can be “an axe for the frozen sea” within us.

Thank you for reading, and see you in 2026.

It’s December, and that means it’s the time of end-of-the-year “best of” and “personal favourites” reading lists. For a writer, it is mildly agonising when you’re not on them, and quite gratifying when you are. This past fortnight, I’ve had two occasions for gratification. K.J. Charles listed THE SENTENCE on their “Best Books of 2025” post, ending their brief review with “far more exciting than a book about legal ethics has any right to be.” I’ll take that, with thanks.

And one thing I did not expect was for THE SENTENCE to end up on a Five Books recommendation list, but it did: in Sylvia Bishop’s "Five Award-Winning Fantasy Novels of 2025” list. (via the Ignyte Award), and she has some very nice things to say about the novel.

After the Five Books list came out, I’ve had some folks who came across the novel there reach out asking about availability. THE SENTENCE will be out in a global edition in early 2027 (including Kindle), albeit with a different title: THE FIFTH INFLECTION, so if you can’t get it now because of geographic restrictions, it’ll be available soon enough. Of course, if you can get it (being Indian, or being able to order from India), and you’re interested - or want to support my writing - it’s available to order on Amazon, here.

Speaking of THE FIFTH INFLECTION, I spent the first half of December working on edits. It’s now with some readers for a sanity check, and in the beginning of the year, it will be back with my editor at Saga Press. The edits plunged me back into the world of Peruma and of Nila, and that was a good thing, as I’ve now pivoted to getting back into writing the sequel to the novel.

What I’m Reading

In this section, I talk about the books I’m reading; but over the weekend, I read an essay that was so incandescent, that I cannot but share it here: in Open Country Mag, “How Wole Soyinka Inherited the Drama of the Gods — and Shadowed the Nigerian Tragedy,” by Otosirieze. If you thought you knew a little bit about Wole Soyinka (as I thought did), a little bit about 20th-Century Nigerian literature (as I thought I did), and a little bit about the tragedy of the Biafran War (as I thought I did) - well, this essay will shatter your assumptions, and construct a world from the fragments.

The essay is not just a profile of Wole Soyinka. Rather, Otosirieze takes on that most challenging of tasks: recounting the political history of a nation reflected in, and reflecting, the artistic, intellectual, moral, political, and ethical life of its most celebrated writer. Such a task is rife with the perils of slipping into homilies or reductionism on the one hand, and getting bogged down in detail on the other. Otosirieze steers a course between these two with the surest of hands, and gives us something truly remarkable: a biography in which the national and the personal are so intertwined that they shine under each other’s light, and with a clarity so harsh that neither the beauty nor the warts can stay artfully hidden.

In this historical story, there are others who have walk-on roles, characters I have known from my reading elsewhere: the gathering at Makarere University in ‘62, which charted a future course for African literature in English (or not); Chinua Achebe, Christopher Okigbo, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and so many others - whose own lives now feel sharper, more clarified, in relation to the richness of Soyinka’s.

The story’s dominant register is tragic, and Otosirieze does not shrink from an accounting of the tragedies, both national and personal. But if art, at its best, lets us make sense of tragedy, then Otosirieze paints a portrait of the artist that does both justice to him, and to his nation. You come out of this essay a little sadder - but not hopeless. That is perhaps all we can wish for.

It’s always a little bittersweet when you learn about a new writer only upon - and because of - their death. Learning about Meja Mwangi on his death had an element of additional chagrin for me, as I’ve actively delved quite a bit into Kenyan literature over the years (or so I thought). It was a reminder, though, about how much our access to literature is curated by centres of publishing power (primarily located in the western world).

When I picked up Going Down River Road - intending to remedy this gap - I could immediately see why Mwangi doesn’t have the name-recognition that some of his Kenyan (and East African) counterparts do. Going Down River Road is a working-class novel par excellence - set entirely within working-class Nairobi, and dealing with the lives of informal construction workers. It’s a world that - to the outside observer - has nothing to recommend itself other than that it exists.

Nor does Mwangi try to extract some kind of lyricism - or nobility - from the lives that he depicts. These are lives lived on the edge of precarity, where existence comes draped in literal - and metaphorical - dust. But what makes this novel what it is, I think, is its unmistakable truth. I don’t mean “truth” in the sense of it being a hyper-realistic novel that tries to represent reality, but in the sense of an artistic truth. The novel is so deeply rooted in, observant of, and sympathetic to, reality that it carries an artistic truth that is immediately evident to the reader - and which makes so much of it linger in the mind after one is done reading.

As I wrote in the last edition of the newsletter, I was introduced to Patti Smith through her obituary for Sam Shepard, and then through her memoir about her life with Robert Mapplethorpe. This made me curious: if Smith could write with such intensity about her lovers, how would she write about her life partner - Fred Smith? Bread of Angels - her latest memoir, published this year - answers this question, because in substantial part, it is about her life with Fred Smith (and her life after his passing, but still wreathed in his memories).

It was also a jarring read, at two levels. When Patti Smith decided to marry Fred, she gave up her career as a rock musician. If you’ve read Just Kids - which traces her life in getting to that point - it is a choice that you’ll fully understand. But it also means that a lot of Bread of Angels is about domestic life, and - in my view - as a writer, Patti Smith is at her least convincing when writing of domesticity. The chapters in question feel flat, almost as if writing them was an effort (in contrast to her account of falling in love with Fred Smith, which crackles with the same intensity as her writing about Mapplethorpe and Shepard); of course, the writing is still good. But there is something missing - the something that gives the rest of her writing (even within the same book) its particular quality of luminousness.

After Fred Smith’s tragic passing, the remaining part of the memoir is an account of how Patti Smith reconstructs her career and makes art again. The book now returns to its more familiar intensity - there’s a line, for example, when Smith is picking a song to open for a Bob Dylan concert - “I stayed up half the night divided between beauty and confrontation” - that made me stop and gasp. And then the second jarring moment: very soon after this line, it is 1999, and quite out of nowhere, she is playing in a concert in Tel Aviv where, apparently, “all three religions are respected.”

It was a jolt because while Smith does not explicitly reveal her politics in Just Kids, it felt clear enough, and it felt that it was not a politics that takes one to Tel Aviv in 1999. I did tell myself, though, that this was six years before the launch of the BDS movement, and in the peak of the Oslo years, so perhaps it is an intelligible decision - especially for someone whose view of this matter was always mediated by American culture and politics.

However, an even more jarring moment comes a few pages later, when Smith is writing of the murder of Rachel Corrie. Here, she indulges in a New York Times-esque erasure of the active subject: she writes that “bulldozers” had destroyed those Rafah houses, and it was a “bulldozer” that crushes Rachel Corrie to death. However, “bulldozers” do not have agency - people do; bulldozers do not demolish homes, and bulldozers do not crush a human being - it is another human being that does so, and in this case, an Israeli soldier. Patti Smith is too good a writer to not know how words work, and so - wrenchingly - one can only chalk this down to the phenomenon that Mohammed el-Kurd speaks of in Perfect Victims: a reflexive and asymmetric humanisation/dehumanisation matrix as far as Israelis and Palestinians are concerned.

I finished the book with a bitter taste in my mouth; there were other beautiful lines that followed - about loss and death, specifically - but it was hard not to read them refracted through what had come before. As I put the book down, I had two thoughts. One - that whatever Patti Smith’s views in 1999 and 2003, this book has been published in 2025, two years into the active genocide, and it feels strange to me how a writer otherwise so acutely sensitive to everything would not scrutinise her own past views in light of how things have subsequently turned out. And secondly, I remembered that Patti Smith counts Jean Genet as one of the signal influences upon her creative life. That makes all of this even more inexplicable, because Jean Genet is not only the Genet of the The Thief’s Journal, but also the Genet of Prisoner of Love - a book about Genet’s time in Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan in the 1970s, and his visit to Sabra/Shatila after the massacre in 1982. Did Patti Smith somehow miss the memo on Prisoner of Love, even as Genet exerted the influence that he did on her life? I do not know, much as I do not quite know, in the last analysis, how to feel about Bread of Angels.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

Check out the really fun prose poem, “Addendum to the Martian Social Studies Textbook, 5th Ed.,” in last week’s issue. And in today’s issue, “The ghosts of me are in your machine,” by the ever-excellent R.B. Lemberg.

The Indian Scene

Congratulations to Tanvi Singh on the publication of what looks like a very fun novel, Iro’s Mermaid. Get yourselves a copy!

Recommendations Corner

Browsing Five Books’ genre categories to see what else they’d recommended, I remembered just how brilliant - and underrated - Peter Watts’ Blindsight is (I’m sure I’ve recommended it here previously, but it doesn’t hurt to do it again). We read it a year and half ago in the Delhi Science Fiction Reading Circle, and it gave rise to one of our most intense - and involved - sessions. This book is marketed as a first contact novel, but we actually read it in our “body horror” month - which perhaps gives you a clue about how unclassifiable it is, but also about how kaleidoscopic it is. It’s a classic spaceship-and-first contact novel, but Watts does so much wildly inventive stuff with the human body, with alienness, and with the intelligibility of the non-human, that it is far more a novel about the human condition than anything - as is the case with the best science fiction!

What I’m Reading

Many years ago, and entirely by accident, I came across a eulogy written by Patti Smith for Sam Shepard. Both names were unfamiliar to me, but “My Buddy” was - and still is - one of the best pieces of writing I’ve ever read. From the first line, her words laughed, wept, and sang - all at once. They possessed the movement of poetry and the rhythm of music. The piece accomplished what every one of us who writes always dreams of accomplishing, but never can: the very depth of feeling sublimated into language in a way that almost no gap remains between the two, what Adam Parry - writing on Virgil - calls “a conscious feeling that the raw emotions of grief have been subsumed in an artistic finality of vision.” Picking on the same lines from the Aeneid, Seamus Heaney would also write of how the “redress of poetry” lies in its ability to absorb and re-absord the “tears of things” (“lacrimae rerum”) into the words of a poem. “My Buddy” was the prose embodiment of this sensation; in the years to come, I would quote its lines (especially “only not just any nowhere, but a sliver of a many-faceted nowhere that, when lifted in a certain light, became a somewhere. I’d pick up the thread, and we’d improvise into dawn, like two beat-up tenor saxophones, exchanging riffs”) at the very beginnings of intimacy.

More than anything else, I’m surprised that it took me so long to come to Patti Smith as a writer; perhaps a lingering apprehension that nothing else could quite match up to the distilled intensity of the eulogy. I need not have worried: when I did finally take the plunge last week - with her memoir, Just Kids - here was everything all over again, and so much more of it.

Just Kids is a coming-of-age story. It is about how Patti Smith arrived in the New York of the 1960s, and - after much stumbling - found her way into her art, as a songwriter who combined poetry with rock-and-roll. It is also about her complex relationship - first as lover, and then as close friend - with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. It is about much else: poverty, precarity, and poetry; New York; the 1960s; the beatniks; the sexual revolution; companionship and jealousy; how music lives in all of us; and what it means to live.

As with “My Buddy,” I found myself reading a book about famous artists that I had only the dimmest awareness of (like everyone else, I had a beatnik phase in my early twenties, but beyond that my knowledge of the American 20th century cultural world is sketchy, at best); as with “My Buddy,” it simply didn’t matter. Just Kids is testament to how literature, at its best, is “universal” (with all the connotations that word contains). The lives of precarious artists living together at Hotel Chelsea from 1966-1969 is highly specific, but love, envy, companionship, solitude, the longing to be “loyal, yet free,” the sadness of being an outsider, the rage of being an outsider, the yearning to create art, and the yearning to create art that is recognised (specially when all of this is mixed up together) - are not.

Here again, there is that depth of feeling, and somehow all the right words: when, early on in their relationship, Robert tells Patti, “nothing is finished until you see it,” there is, somehow, crystallised into seven words what an entire book about intimacy would struggle to communicate. “I craved honesty, yet found dishonesty in myself,” in eight words, sublimates that strange alchemy of self-forgiveness and self-loathing that inhabits everyone trying to create art under conditions of capitalism. “My tears are inside - a blindfold keeps them there,” gives words to a feeling that, until I read these lines, seemed impossible to name. When Robert Lowell called Elizabeth Bishop an “unerring muse who makes the casual perfect?,” it was one thing, but Patti Smith writing about how Robert Mapplethorpe was a “master of transforming the insignificant into the divine” crackles with quite a different electricity. In Just Kids, lines like these form the scaffolding of a work that - to quote Smith herself - is “part boxcar, part fairyland.”

The book is shot through with pain, and nowhere more so at the end, when Mapplethorpe dies (young). In another book that I read recently - John Williams’ Stoner - I realised that there is a way in which literature can, if not ennoble death, at least dignify it. Reading the end of Just Kids made me think of death again, and specifically, the last line of my favourite Shakespearean Sonnet, #146: that if, on one’s death, one could be written of in the ways that Patti Smith wrote of Robert Mapplethorpe (or, for that matter, Sam Shepard), then indeed, “death once dead, there’s no more dying then.”

Every time I’m in Sydney - as I am now - I visit Galaxy Bookshop - that rare type of bookstore entirely devoted to fantasy, science fiction, and horror (and in these times, romantasy as well)! One of the things I do there - other than browsing through the most complete collection of SF Masterworks that I’ve ever seen anywhere - is to add to my Alastair Reynolds backlist.

This time I picked up Revenger. Revenger is the first book in the Revenger series; in my usual haphazard way of reading Reynolds, I first read the fantastic Bone Silence, which is actually Book 3. A Reynolds series, however, is never a strict “trilogy,” and one of the great things about his work is that the series are a set of loosely connected novels that draw from each other, but can also be read as stand-alones.

I’m half-way through Revenger - more when I finish - and so far, it has all the classic Reynolds elements: space opera where two or more ingenious premises (in this case, interstellar communication via the “skulls” of a long-extinct species, and an alien-managed financial system run on eerie currency-shaped objects called “quoins”) combine with the awe and wonder of deep space and time (here, a cycle of galactic civilisations called “occupations” that rise and fall, and some of whose - valuable - remains are preserved - and chased by bounty-hunters - across the galaxy in strange “baubles.”) Think of a swashbuckling pirate story, but told in the space opera tenor, and you’ll get a sense of Revenger.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

Episode 18 of the Critical Friends podcast has a very good discussion on fantasy and history.

Also, for our November non-fiction issue, I edited a brilliant piece by Tanvir Ahmed titled “Photon Torpedoes Break the Space Muqarnas: SFF Audiovisuals and Anti-Muslim Violence.” As you can tell by the title, this is an exploration of some of the violently racialised themes underlying popular SFF media: Ahmed takes Star Trek and Game of Thrones (they don’t come much more popular and mainstream than that), and subjects them to a really close and illuminating scrutiny. Ahmed’s previous piece for us was about an author that I grew up loving (Guy Gavriel Kay), and this one, again, is a truly excellent piece of cultural criticism: give it a read.

The Indian Scene

There is not much going around this week; we announced that we’d be opening soon for submissions to volume 2 of the IF Anthology of New Indian SFF, so keep a look out both on Westland’s social media, and mine, for details - they should be out this week!

Recommendations Corner

Since we’re on the subject of Alastair Reynolds, and although I did talk about this book recently, I want to re-recommend it, especially because it seems to have completely slipped through the cracks of the Reynolds ouevre. I couldn’t find a copy even in Galaxy, although they did have copies of his other lesser-discussed work (such as House of Suns). I do think that Century Rain has claim to be Reynold’s best novel (or at least, one of his very best). It manages to be both alt-history and alt-future at the same time, a love letter to a real Paris as well as an imagined Paris, and all with a dollop of space opera with truly existential stakes. I also think this is amongst his best-written novels, just in terms of the prose style, and it’s one that will not let you go once you get into it.

Finally, a note to new readers, who found this substack via my Indian SF essay: if you want to explore my own work further, you can get a copy of my third - and latest - SF novel, The Sentence, here. While it is coming out in a new, global edition in early 2027, the Indian edition remains - and will remain - very much on the market.

The delay does mean, however, that I can, at last, share a piece that has been many months in the making. Earlier this week, the inaugural issue of Alter Mag published my long read on the secret history of Indian science fiction. I’d written this piece over the summer, and while it took a while to finally see the light of day, it’s been worth the wait, as the folks at Alter Mag have done some truly spectacular things with the layout, design, and - most beguilingly - interactive graphics. Give it a read, preferably on a desktop rather than a phone, and I’d love to know what you think!

What I’m Reading

John Williams’ Stoner spent more than a year on my study table before I finally took it up. In hindsight, it’s probably a book you need some mental time to prepare for before you read it. The seemingly innocuous biography of a seemingly mediocre early-20th century English professor in an American small-town university, Stoner is a novel of quiet devastation, of all the lives a human being does not live, of how the inertia of every single day adds up to a life of non-fulfilment, of a love that is found against all odds and then, tragically, “relinquished into the chaos of potentiality” (that line still makes my heart stop), of how ordinary unhappiness acquires jarring grandeur in the backdrop of global human folly (World War I), and how, despite all that, there can still be a sadness in endings that is tinged with nobility. I loved this book with a love in the shadow of a terror that any of those endings might have been - could still be - mine. Indeed, it is not an easy book to love - but when was love easy?

Of late, Stoner has been “rediscovered,” and its rediscovery has generated quite a bit of controversy. A lot of reviewers have panned it. I don’t know about any of that, but what I do know is that even if the rest of the book deserves to be consigned to a waste-paper basket (it does not), just for one single scene - that deals with death and dying in the most tender, humane, and heart-shattering way imaginable - it is a book for all the ages.

We read this book for the November meeting of the Delhi Science Fiction Reading Circle. It polarised opinion: some people loved it, some hated it, and then there were some - like me - who, in the words of one of our members, were “violently ambivalent” about it.

This book, set in a post-apocalyptic other world that begins with a group of women imprisoned for reasons that they do not know, and ends with the last woman in all the world, just did not do anything for me: its post-apocalyptic setting felt trite, its prose style flat (perhaps a translation issue), and its narrative something I’d read a million times before, and in much better forms. The only level at which it slightly worked for me was as a Nozick-style thought experiment, a lab setting with heavily constrained conditions, and a reflection on some basic human patterns of behaviour within that setting.

Of late, Adrian Tchaikovsky has taken to exploring ruined, post-apocalyptic landscapes as well (see e.g. Service Model). In Bee Speaker, a delegation of well-meaning and ill-prepared Martians, responding to a distress call, arrive on a blighted earth, where warring bands that seem to be reliving the Viking era, factories that churn out “monster-automatons” (but with what seems to be a soul), doughty villages, and an enigmatic order of monks, eke out a precarious existence between collaboration and conflict. At the centre of this are the “bees,” a distributed intelligence that was originally blamed for the devastation on earth, but eventually was the reason why humanity could survive on Mars.

Bee Speaker is vintage Tchaikovsky: its scientific-speculative premise is both rigorous and thrilling, and the social commentary both understated and biting. In this book, the way in which an ex-billionaire tries to avoid the breakdown of the world by building both a bunker and a viking-style cult felt both so brilliantly prescient and so darkly funny, that you could literally picture the through line from our present to that future. My only complaint was that I would really have loved to see more about the bees, with my fascination for distributed intelligences in science fiction. Maybe in the next novel!

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

This conversation on writing diaspora, between Kat Kourbeti and R.B. Lemberg, is well worth your time. Ursula Le Guin features too, as a selling point.

The Indian Scene

Nothing stirring this week, but look out on social media for the submissions call for Volume 2 of the IF Anthology of New Indian SFF, coming very soon. As last time, it will be a blind submissions process.

Recommendations Corner

My essay on the secret history of Indian SF triggered some interesting reactions online. While most responses have been warm and generous, some people have really not liked the piece, and while these people do not necessarily agree with each other, the object of their ire is the same: Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, with whom I begin my piece. One set of people has a problem with the fact that she was a Bengali Muslim woman writer (you can guess who these people are, and what other views they hold). Another set has a problem with the fact that a utopian fiction story should not be given any space in discussing a genre whose high priest and master is Isaac Asimov (you can probably guess who these people are as well). A third set - rather bewilderingly - has taken issue with the fact that The Sultana’s Dream has been discussed as a science fiction story instead of a feminist story (it is, of course, a feminist science fiction story). And then there is a final set that objected that the piece does not talk about Bengali SF - once again, seemingly ignoring the fact that it begins and ends with a Bengali Muslim woman writer (perhaps that is the problem!).

All of which is to say, why not make your day - and ruin someone else’s - by reading or re-reading Begum Rokeya, in Penguin’s superb edition that brings together both her SF stories, Sultana’s Dream and Padmarag? Treat yourself to some OG Indian science fiction, because - as the sub-heading of the piece notes - before Asimov, there was Rokeya.

First up, thank you to everyone who read and said so many supportive things about the last issue of the newsletter where I talked about my writing journey, including folks who took the time out to write to me personally. Individuals can’t overhaul structures, but we can at least be honest about what the nature of those structures, and what they demand of us; I’m glad that my attempt at doing so has been helpful to others who are also navigating their way through publishing.

A follow-up on what I talked about in the previous issue: while the book now titled THE FIFTH INFLECTION will be published by Saga Press in early 2027, in India, it remains THE SENTENCE. The Saga edition itself will be available for sale outside the South Asian territories, but not in India. In other words, if you’re an Indian reader, and are curious about the novel, or want to read it, it’ll be easier for you to get THE SENTENCE, as it exists now, either in an Indian bookshop, or online (here).

What I’m Reading

I continued my slow journey through the Alastair Reynolds backlist by picking up a second-hand copy of Century Rain at Bookworm bookshop in Bangalore. I’d never heard anything about this novel before, and after reading it, I’m placing it alongside House of Suns in the underrated-but-utterly-brilliant-Alastair-Reynolds-novel category. Phew, this was a ride.

Century Rain is Reynolds doing what he does best: take one (or two) very simple and very familiar SF ideas (one could even call them borderline tropes), and treat them in a way that you feel all the wonder and all the awe that comes with a momentary flash of insight into the vastness of space and time and the fragility of existence. In Century Rain, that is the idea of the mirror world. Reynolds is not the first with that idea, and he certainly wouldn’t be the last, but he is utterly unique in how he conveys that oceanic feeling around the idea.

Another thing about this book is that it is a love letter to Paris, in at least three different guises: our Paris, an alt-Paris, and a ruined Paris. Paris is, of course, one of the most over-written and over-determined cities in the world, but Century Rain speaks Paris in a way no other novel has (and would probably be impossible outside of SFF).

Finally, this is a novel where the ending is like a Russian doll: each time you think it’s done, there’s a further reveal, a further sting in the tail, right until the literal last sentence. This is a notoriously hard thing to pull off (sticking the ending is hard, period), and Reynolds is a virtuoso at it. The ending is also haunting: without giving anything away, it has echoes of the ending of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. Century Rain was written four years after the conclusion of the trilogy, and I do wonder if there was some inspiration at play there.

Eight years after I first read Ancillary Justice, I came back to it as it was the assigned book for the October meeting of the Delhi Science Fiction Reading Circle. I was wondering when I started how it would hold up, but as it turned out, other than a couple of scenes, I had completely forgotten this novel, so in many ways, it was like reading it for the first time.

There are times - more often than I’d like - when I read a canonical novel, or a novel that swept all the awards, and I wonder what all the fuss was really about. Ancillary Justice is not such a novel: while it did divide opinion in our reading circle, for me, especially given the year of its publication (2013), I can entirely see both why its perceived as a genre-changing novel, and why it swept the awards the following year. In the last decade, many writers have written fascinating books featuring sentient spaceships (for example, Aliette de Bodard), and exploring the limits of gender is now almost de rigeur for the genre. Neither of these things was true in 2013, though (that is not to say it hadn’t happened before, of course) - and in reading Ancillary Justice now, I can see how it influenced so much of what followed in the decade, from A Memory Called Empire to The City in the Middle of the Night.

Yet - and I think this is the mark of a great novel - Ancillary Justice does not feel dated because of what came after it. Even though subsequent novels undoubtedly built on the foundations that it laid, Ancillary Justice’s own treatment of these issues feels as fresh as it would have in 2013. That is not to say that the novel is without its flaws (is treatment of empire is questionable, there’s a middle part where it drags, and for the life of me, I cannot understand the point of the ice bridge scene), but then, to be flawed is the prerogative of pioneers, and when there’s so much newness that glitters in the novel (like the snow on its ice planet), that the flaws ultimately pale into insignificance.

I finally read Han Kang’s We Do Not Part.

I think there’s a lot to say about the craft of this novel (including some oddly disjointed moments, although arguably that was the point), and perhaps even more to say about the undeniable brilliance of the translation. Yet, my overwhelming feeling throughout reading the second half, and after I’d finished, was this: here’s yet another 20th century massacre perpetrated against the left that I’d never heard of, and would never have heard of, were it not for a novel uncovering it for me.

We Do Not Part is a recollection, decades after the fact, of a 1940s, State-led massacre of Korean communists on Jeju Island (there’s something to be said for the fact that much like Bali, which was also a site of a very similar massacre, Jeju is now a prime holiday destination). A year or so ago, I’d read Kaya Press’ new translation of A Song of Arirang, and so I was somewhat aware of the revolutionary legacy of Korea in the 1920s and 30s. After that, there was a gap: I had a general sense that after the Korean War, South Korea spent many years under a West-sponsored military dictatorship before emerging into market democracy decades later. It never occurred to me to wonder, however, what happened to that revolutionary tradition, and why there’s no trace of it now.

We Do Not Part answers the question: there’s no trace because it was physically eliminated. It was physically eliminated much like how the anarchists and communists were physically eliminated in Japan after the Great Kanto Earthquake, and how a million communists were physically eliminated in Indonesia in 1965. Mourid Barghouti ends his memoir, I Saw Ramallah, with the verse “What deprives the spirit of its colours?/ What is it other than the bullets of the invaders that have hit the body?” That is pretty much what you feel when you put down We Do Not Part.

The novel strongly reminded me of Eka Kurniawan’s Beauty Is A Wound. These two books are stylistically very different, but both of them seek to use fiction to uncover political massacres that the histories - having been written by the victors - tend to pass over (in the case of Indonesia, this is probably changing of late). It also made me think of the role of fiction in our lives. In Grand Hotel Abyss, Stuart Jeffries has this to say about Walter Benjamin:

“He was a historian … not just of defeated humans, but of expendable things that, back in the day, had been the last word … In his last essay, Benjamin wrote: ‘There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.’ That sense of the repression of the unacceptable, the embarrassing, the awkward, the ideological disappearing of that which doesn’t fit the master narrative, had come early to him and remained with him lifelong: barbarism, for Walter Benjamin, began at home.”

This, to me, sums up books like We Do Not Part and Beauty Is a Wound, and this is why we need fiction: it can do exactly this, in a way that non-fiction might not be able to.

The other thing that struck me was that every time I read more about mid-20th-century South-East Asia, it seems both that this was the place that saw the most direct physical violence against, and destruction of, the organised left, as well as the most complete erasure of that violence and destruction. I haven’t read enough to know whether there was more violence in Latin America, or in parts of Africa, but I feel that this combination of massacres and amnesia is something unique in the history of State-led violence against the organised left. Given how significant this area was for the Cold War, this is perhaps not all that unsurprising; and yet, there’s something both galling and infuriating about the feeling that every read like We Do Not Part is an exercise in the excavation of a buried past that should never have been buried, but should have always informed the way we understand the world and how we act on that understanding. Instead, it’s something akin to having been once deprived of language, and now having it restored to us word by word and sentence by sentence, instead of the entire grammar. And for me, the power of We Do Not Part - apart from its literary qualities - lies in how starkly and uncompromisingly it does that.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

Check out the latest edition of the Critical Friends podcast, that addresses a very fraught issue in contemporary SFF: how to write about hope and optimism in a genre whose grammar is often the grammar of “ruthless criticism of all that exists.”

The Indian Scene

I decided to put this in the Indian Scene rather than at the beginning of this newsletter, but over the last week, a fair few reviews of the Between Worlds anthology have come in. Today was the New Indian Express, which is a bit of a cross between coverage of our launch event at Champaca Bangalore, and a review. The crown jewel, though, was undoubtedly a review of the anthology in Locus Magazine, by the redoubtable Niall Harrison. If you’re a subscriber, you can read it now; otherwise, I’ll share it once it comes out of the paywall.

In the meantime, get your copy of Between Worlds here.

In more specific Delhi news, there’s a new outlet of Bookshop Inc, which has just opened in Vasant Kunj, in the same building as FabIndia, and next to FabCafe. It has all of the classic Bookshop vibe, and FabCafe literally a doorway away doesn’t hurt.

And if you’re passing by, you could stop by the SFF section, although I might be just a tad bit biased about the collection…

Recommendations Corner

Since we’re talking Ann Leckie, I want to recommend one of her books that seems to have dropped off the radar a bit since it came out in 2023. Translation State is broadly set in the universe of the Imperial Radch trilogy, but it’s a wildly different book; and if you thought that Ancillary Justice was mind-bending, Translation State will twist your mind into a pretzel with its weirdness. It also does something that, for me, is one of the hardest things to pull off in SFF: it has an entirely non-anthropomorphic narrative point of view, which is simultaneously entirely alien, but also terrifyingly intelligible.

You will need a lot of persistence. You will need a lot of luck. And unless you’re extremely lucky, in the process, you will feel feelings of despair, bitterness, envy, and worthlessness. Let yourself feel them, because in the circumstances, they are natural. Have a WhatsApp group with close writer friends where you can vent (don’t tweet out those feelings!). You may find that some friendships were transactional. In the words of Elizabeth Bishop, master the art of losing them. And - while this may sound trite - let the agony of publishing not efface the joy of writing - which is what this is all really about.

Hello everyone, and welcome to a - slightly different - issue of Words for Worlds.

For all that we critique literary awards, and are keenly aware of their shortcomings, it’s almost annoying how nice it feels when you actually win one. This past week, THE SENTENCE won the best adult novel gong at the 2025 Ignyte Awards.

I know it’s the done thing to express astonishment at an award win - whether or not you were secretly expecting to win - but I have to say, I genuinely was surprised. While the Ignyte shortlist is selected by a jury, the final winner is decided by popular vote, and out of all the books on the shortlist, THE SENTENCE was the only one not (yet) easily available to buy outside India. Nonetheless, enough people did vote for it, and I’m very delighted. The Ignytes are where you go if you want to discover novels outside of the big publisher/Hugo/Nebula conduit, so this is a rare honour indeed.

The Sentence becomes The Fifth Inflection

And it’s also a segue into another piece of news about THE SENTENCE that I’ve had to keep under wraps for a few months, but which was - finally - officially announced on October 16th. THE SENTENCE will, at last, have a global edition. It has been acquired by Saga Press (US), an imprint of S&S, and will come out under a new title - The Fifth Inflection - in early 2027.

This is a moment of both joy and relief. But I also want to use it to do something that I’ve seen other writers do for their own landmark moments (getting an agent, or a book deal etc): that is, write about their journey up to that point. The reason for this is that publishing is an extremely challenging industry, and is often difficult to decode, especially when you’re starting out. Reading other writers provide insiders’ accounts, so to say, helped me at various steps of my own path, and I similarly hope that this can help other writers who are at various stages of this long and arduous process.

So I’ll begin by talking about the journey itself, and then offer up a few reflections on it.

The Journey

For the purposes of this post, it began in 2019, which is the year that I finished writing my debut novel, The Wall. In 2019, I had very little understanding of how publishing worked, so when HarperCollins India offered me a contract for The Wall and The Horizon, I took it without any clear idea of what came next.

Soon after the publication of The Wall in mid-2020, I understood that it was virtually impossible for a novel (especially, a genre novel) published in India, by an Indian publisher, to travel beyond Indian borders. Indian publishers lack the infrastructure to place their books in bookshops abroad, or to do any kind of marketing for online sales. After speaking to a few people, it became evident that the only route was to ask HarperCollins India to revert non-South Asia rights to me, and to begin querying US and UK-based literary agents as the first step to having The Wall and The Horizon published abroad.

After getting my world rights back from HarperCollins India (a smooth process), I sent my first agent query on 2 February, 2021. At this point, The Wall had received very good reviews in Locus Magazine and a couple of other places, and had featured on the Locus Recommended Reading List for 2020. Through my work as a Strange Horizons editor for six+ years, I was also in enough genre spaces to get advice on what an agent “query letter” should contain (a privilege that, I know, not everyone starting out has). So, I was somewhat confident that, over the course of a few months of querying, I would find an agent for The Wall.

My confidence turned out to be misplaced. Over the next two years, I sent out a total of seventy-five queries to literary agents (I used a combination of Twitter, my friends, and the excellent free service provided by QueryTracker to make my list of agents). I received a total of seventy-five rejections. These rejections ranged the full spectrum from non-replies (what we call “CNRs” - “Closed, No Response”) to generic form rejections, to form rejections after requests for partial or full manuscripts, to no responses on partial or full manuscripts, to the agonising “this was a close one, but I’ll pass.” Some of the rejections came from agents who were very enthusiastic on reading the query or the partial manuscript, and sometimes took many months before rejecting the full manuscript - making the experience all the more agonising. I can’t quite recall when I gave up, but I think it was around the time that I began writing The Sentence: I gave up both because I was running out of agents I wanted to query, and because it didn’t seem to make sense to continue querying what was now a three-year-old published novel.

It had been suggested to me that one possible reason for rejection, at least in some cases, might have been The Wall’s prior publication in India. So, for The Sentence, I began querying with the unpublished manuscript. Over the course of eight months, I sent fifty-one queries, and received a total of fifty-one rejections, bringing the total number of rejections to 126 over two novels and four years. By October 2023, I began to feel that if this continued much longer, I would be stuck in a perpetual cycle of query-reject-query, and - once again - I needed to move on before I fell behind even further in my writing career. I approached Westland India with the manuscript. Karthika enjoyed the book. We signed a contract (this time I reserved non-South Asia rights at the outset). The Sentence came out in India in November 2024.

At this point, I had given up the idea of re-querying, and had started work on my next novel. In the January 2025 edition of Locus Magazine, however, genre critic Abigail Nussbaum wrote a very positive review of The Sentence. She ended it by noting that it was a pity that none of The Wall, The Horizon, and The Sentence were available outside India. This was echoed on BlueSky by Matthew Cavanagh, a respected British genre reviewer. Literary agents on BlueSky saw these posts, and were intrigued. Some of them wrote (on BlueSky) saying that they’d be interested in seeing a query.

In publishing, things may not happen in forever (or not at all); but if and when they do, they can happen very quickly. Within four days of the start of my “re-querying,” on January 15, 2025, I had my first offer: from John Baker of Bell Lomax Moreton, with whom I eventually signed. I signed with John at the end of the month. At the beginning of April, we “went on sub”: that is, the step of the process when your literary agent submits your manuscript to editors.

As with the querying process itself, “being on sub” can result in just about anything: from an offer in two weeks to a wait period of many months, to “dying on sub” - that is, the book never getting picked up. I was lucky. At the end of May - after being just under two months “on sub” - John called to say that Sareena Kamath, the editor of Saga Press, wanted to talk. I was in Sydney, and ended up having “the call” at 3 AM. It was worth it. The Saga offer of publication came in half an hour after the call. It is this offer that was, finally, officially announced on October 16.

The Numbers

So, to recap, with some numbers. From my first query (February 1, 2021) to my agent offer (January 15, 2025), it took four years, three novels, and 126 rejections. From the time I finished writing my debut novel (Summer 2019) to when I accepted a worldwide publication offer (Summer 2025, for a different novel), it took six years. And from the time I finished that debut novel (Summer 2019) to when I will be published worldwide (early 2027), it will have been eight years.

Luck and Persistence

I want to offer up a few reflections on this process, as well as some other observations about my experiences in genre spaces in that time.

The first is that this is a process that needs both immense persistence and immense luck. I see people talk about persistence all the time (speaking about the “querying trenches”), but not always about luck. Had the Locus review not come out when it did, had it not said what it did, and had it not been amplified by those who amplified it, agents may never have asked me to query them. I find it quite striking that after 126 failed cold queries, what finally got me an agent was not the 127th cold query, but a very pointed review in a genre magazine: in a sense, I owe my career to that review.

Where a part of the persistence comes in is that from the beginning, I had been doggedly sending review copies to magazines, including those that never responded. For The Wall, because HarperCollins India simply weren’t doing it, I remember couriering two physical copies at my own expense to Locus’ US office, and for The Sentence, I was insistent that Locus be sent advance copies. You need a lot of luck, but you also need to do the things so that if luck goes out looking one evening, it might find you on its path.

Of course, mine is a specific example of a book previously published in India (where it is still possible to be published without an agent). Persistence takes other shapes, including refining your query letter and your synopsis even when it seems pointless because all you’re getting is rejections, or just … writing the next novel and telling yourself that one day your first will be published as “early works”, and read like we now read Ursula Le Guin’s Rocannon’s World.

Despair, Envy, Bitterness, Worthlessness

There are a few additional things about the process that I want to talk about.

First: no matter how much self-belief you have, querying is something that is virtually designed to shatter your confidence, make you question and doubt your abilities, and induce feelings of despair, envy, bitterness, and worthlessness. To an extent, this cannot be helped. No-one enjoys rejection. Multiple rejections sting more. Form rejections after the amount of work you put in crafting each individual query to fit the agent you’re querying hurt yet even more. Nobody can remedy this, because literary agents are massively overworked (receiving thousands of queries a month).

That is not to say that every literary agent is equally professional in their rejections: as with so many other people, I have many accounts of being “ghosted on a full (manuscript),” the performative spotlighting of “underrepresented voices” that doesn’t translate into anything concrete, and other similar stories, and there is that one agency whose automated rejection email included the needlessly callous line “we have deleted your materials”: but my point is that if you were to take away all the specifically bad experiences, these feelings would still exist.

Yet what I think makes these feelings worse is that far too often, the discourse in genre spaces shames you for feeling them. By this I mean the following: modern publishing is embedded in capitalism, atomises writers, and forces them to compete against each other. I’m not saying this as a value judgment, but as a straightforward matter of fact. If an agent is receiving a thousand queries a month, and will sign on two clients in a year, then you are, quite literally, competing against thousands of other people. Similarly, if an editor receives hundreds of manuscripts on sub, and picks ten, you are - once again - competing. I wish this was not the case, and I wish that we did not have this artificial scarcity imposed on us, as is the case with everything under capitalism. I wish we did not have to compete against each other, but that is how it happens presently under publishing.

That being the case, I believe the honest thing is to accept that this is how it happens (while always holding out hope and working to change reality), and to also accept that, therefore, it is natural to feel envy and jealousy (and then to vent it out among your trusted writer friends). Discourse in genre spaces, however, simply denies the fact of competition: we are constantly told that nobody is competing, that everyone benefits, that there is no (constantly-shrinking) “pie” that is being divided amongst a very limited group of people. And this, for me, is a terrible thing to do, because not only does it distort the nature of the beast and in some ways prevent any critique of the structure by distorting what it’s really about, but at a personal level - as I mentioned above - you start to shame yourself for even feeling envy and jealousy. You start to tell yourself that there is something wrong with you for feeling these feelings - leading to a spiral of toxicity and self-recrimination (I say this as someone who has gone down this exact path).

It’s also crucial to acknowledge that not only is it a competition, but in some significant ways, but for a vast number of people, it is not an even competition. Some of the biggest agents, for example, are “closed to unsolicited queries” - that is, you can only query them if one of their existing clients refers you. Now, how would you get to know one of their existing clients? Possibly, you might have been taught a class by them at the very expensive and very selective Clarion West Workshop. Or something equivalent. So, when you cold-query, you’re competing not only with the thousands of other cold-querying writers, but you’re also starting substantially behind the writers who start the querying process already embedded within the literary establishment. Once again, in such situations, feeling envy or jealousy or even bitterness or anger is natural: it is easier to accept being unlucky, but it is a lot harder to accept the nagging feeling of never having had a fair chance in the first place.

Hierarchies in a Small World

For all the volume in terms of querying and submissions, it’s still a small world. You see people who start querying alongside you receive offers and go on to book deals while you’re still crafting your eighty-seventh query, and it takes a toll. In my case, I was part of a group of Indian writers who all began to write (and publish) at around the same time (2018-2020), but the last among them to “crack” a global publisher. There’s a very specific kind of insecurity that comes with feeling that you’re the only one left behind in a group of your own peers; the point to reiterate, however, is that just like jealousy and envy, insecurity is a natural consequence of the way the process atomises and sets writers to compete for limited spaces, while denying them the vocabulary to articulate this.

This insecurity is heightened by the fact that this pre-existing gap now seems to be continually widening. So, while you’re spending an hour a day crafting your next query letter - an hour that you could have spent improving your craft - you know that your peers who now have the security of an agent are actually spending that time writing. It begins to feel not only like you’re being left behind, but that there’s no real way to catch up. This, too, is a natural feeling to feel.

In some ways, though, I think that these feelings are exacerbated by the fact that within genre spaces, hierarchies are created based on whether or not you are published by a US/UK publisher. There are exceptions to this, of course: Locus Magazine, which frequently reviews books published outside the US/UK, reviewers like Matthew, the Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog, and so on. But in far too many genre spaces, your “worth” as a writer is measured by where you’ve been published (I’ve written about this previously when talking about anthology commissioning). I realised this during multiple unsuccessful attempts to have The Wall reviewed; it was also extremely evident from observing the very different reactions to books that were originally published in India, and then subsequently received US/UK editions: the difference in attention, access to reviewing and genre spaces etc was night and day.

Unfortunately, sometimes, this tends to affect writers as well - it’s always noticeable when a writer you’ve been on friendly terms with gets a book deal and suddenly no longer seems to have time for you! It feels even more absurd when - as I’ve written above - so much of this is about luck, and having been in the right place at the right time. But as with everything else, that is how it is.

I do think, though, that genre spaces (especially reviewing spaces) could be a lot more inclusive in this regard, apart from inclusivity along other axes. It might go some way towards mitigating the feelings of alienation and self-doubt that the process brings.

Untidy Endnotes

Getting a book deal isn’t a guarantee of writerly “success” in the tangible sense, of course. The book may tank; you might not sell another one; and so on. Every week, you can read yet another bleak - and true - newsletter by a writer on the state of publishing, and of reading; of how publishing is becoming increasingly top-heavy, with more and more resources being poured into franchises (especially those with nostalgia value), and the hollowing out of the “mid-list.”

That, though, is something even further beyond a writer’s control than the query and the sub. And perhaps that will be the subject of another newsletter piece, a few years in the future! For now, and in this post, I’ve recounted what it took for me to get from the point of having written my first novel, to having signed a contract with Saga Press for my third, and the many years, steps, and rejections it took. This is not meant to be a “bleak” post (I mean, I did finally get there!), but one that takes a clear-eyed look at the challenges involved.

You will need a lot of persistence. You will need a lot of luck. And unless you’re extremely lucky, in the process, you will feel feelings of despair, bitterness, envy, and worthlessness. Let yourself feel them, because in the circumstances, they are natural. Have a WhatsApp group with close writer friends where you can vent (don’t tweet out those feelings!). You may find that some friendships were transactional. In the words of Elizabeth Bishop, master the art of losing them. And - while this may sound trite - let the agony of publishing not efface the joy of writing - which is what this is all really about.

Because, when you strip it all way, we write because we can’t not write.

PS. I should mention that another path sometimes open to Indian writers - that is, of having the Indian literary establishment “present” you to the West as a voice out of India - was never an option for me, ever since I carpet-bombed my relationship with said establishment over the Jaipur Literary Festival. That, however, is a story for another day.

This Thursday - October 9th - I’ll be at Hauz Khas Social, talking about “Justice in the Multiverse,” which is just a fancy way of saying “how has science fiction dealt with ideas of justice?” It begins at 6 45 PM, and tickets are available here.

The big personal update is that on my (37th!) birthday a couple of weeks ago, I finally began writing the sequel to THE SENTENCE. And by “writing”, I don’t mean keeping my Scrivener open while scrolling Twitter, or opening new blank folders for “Characters”, “Places”, and “Events”, or pretending to think about the “plot” while falling asleep in bed, but actually writing. I’m around 10,000 words in, and I think it’s crossed the hump where I can now say that for better or for worse, this book will get written.

I’m always amused at my writing process (for fiction), which seems designed to generate maximum self-hatred. For this book, I’ve now been procrastinating for 8+ months (the idea came to me in a conversation with my agent back in January), devising various excuses not to start. And this has been the case before as well: months of a dry spell, accompanied by debilitating self-doubt and a lot of beating myself up (a kind term for it would be “writer’s block); and then, one day, the dam breaks, the words flow, and I can do little else until something resembling a first draft is ready.

By the way, I say “sequel”, but it is not strictly a sequel. Like THE SENTENCE, this will be a stand-alone novel, set in the same universe; it’s set twelve years after the events of THE SENTENCE, with a few character overlaps, but it will be written as a second, stand-alone novel in a similar style. So, expect more high-stakes speculative legal drama, and a lot of cold coffee.

And finally, speaking of THE SENTENCE, the book news I’ve been promising for a while will be out very soon - hopefully in the next issue of this newsletter!

What I’m Reading

It’s been a stop-start couple of weeks: I’ve started a few books, but put them down because they’ve singularly failed to grip. One book that I will be finishing, though, is Lalla Romano’s In Farthest Seas, continuing my foray into my post-Ferrante Italian reading, which started with Elsa Morante. As with Morante, Romano is a precursor of Ferrante, a mid-late 20th-century Italian writers (In Farthest Seas was written in 1987), and you can trace the lines of influence in the depth and intensity of the relationships that are portrayed. More when I finish the book.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

Our 29th September issue was a celebration of the 25th anniversary of Strange Horizons - yes, we’re that old! You’ll find a lot of treasures in the archives here. Our podcast editor also conducted a set of interviews with magazine staff. On the one hour and 24 mins mark, I talk about a decade at the magazine, imagining and conceptualising our special issues, how the genre has changed in that time, and how the extractivism special issue came to be.

The Indian Scene

On the 19th of October, at 6 PM, we’ll be launching Between Worlds: the IF Anthology of New Indian SFF, at Champaca - with a conversation with our Bangalore-based contributors. Mark your calendars, and drop by if you’re in the city!

Recommendations Corner

I was going over some of my old reads the other day and it struck me that this book, although very popular in its time, isn’t really talked about these days - and doesn’t really seem to have endured as a genre classic. This is a pity, as it should be a genre classic. Einstein’s Dreams is a series of vignettes set in words identical to ours, with one difference: in each of these words, time works in a different way. In one world, it travels backwards, in another world in fits and starts, and in yet another world, it’s a visible dimension, as visible as space. The connecting thread is that each of these vignettes is a dream of Albert Einstein, who is in the final stages of working out the theory of relativity.

In style and form, Einstein’s Dreams is reminiscent of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, with time replacing cities as the centre of each vignette. It also reminded me of Borges’ Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, in how it jerks our minds out of ease by imagining entirely different ways of organising reality.

I’ll be in Bangalore on the weekend of 18th October to launch Between Worlds at Champaca, along with the Bangalore-based contributors to the anthology. We’ll be announcing officially soon, but Bangalore folks, block your calendars.

We’re also approaching a year to the release of The Sentence (how time flies!), and I’ll be sharing some news about that very soon. In the meantime, you can get it here.

What I’m Reading

For this month’s meeting of the Delhi Science Fiction Reading Circle, we had a return to Chinese SFF, and we read an old-ish classic: Chi Ta-Wei’s The Membranes, first published in 1996, in a Taiwan newly liberated from martial law. The Membranes is one of those books that teaches you the value of reading in community: I wasn’t very impressed on reading the book, but twenty-plus people picking it apart brought in so many themes I’d missed in my solo read, including plenty of lightbulb moments. The book really is deceptive in how many layers are concealed within a quite simple surface (fitting, since one of the novel’s themes is dermal care!).

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

We’re a speculative fiction magazine, but sometimes there’s nothing like a good, old-style love poem (with the vaguest of speculative threads!), and that’s what you get with “I Love You Like an Apple Tree in Full Bloom.”

The Indian Scene

Nothing stirring this week.

Recommendations Corner

I’m acquainted with Chen Qiufan through his famous novel, Waste Tide (which I reviewed when it came out). I’d always thought of him as a novelist of ideas, with writing that was intricate, bordering on the dense. So I was very pleasantly surprised when I read his novelette, “Deathless,” for our reading circle meeting. Loosely inspired by David Graeber’s Debt, and with the premise of having your debt genetically inscribed within your DNA, “Debtless” is tautly paced, tightly plotted - and even has action sequences, drawing from space opera’s classic “throw them out of the airlock” trope. It’s an excellent story, and one that I’d highly recommend.

It’s been raining podcasts this week. First up, The Sentence was a pick on the latest issue of the Octothorpe podcast. The novel is discussed from around the 1 hour 5 mins mark. I must say, hearing The Sentence being called “China Mieville, but with better editing” was not on my bingo card for 2025 (or ever!); but as someone who has used Mieville’s work as comparator titles for all my agent/publisher pitches for the last five years, I am extremely flattered.

Two podcasts that I’d done over the summer also went live this week. First up, I returned to the ArcX podcast (a series on South Asian speculative writers), in their season 2 (listen to the conversation here, expertly anchored by Anjali Alappat), talking about the novel and about the present state of South Asian SFF more generally. And then I was on the If This Goes On podcast, in a wide-ranging conversation covering The Wheel of Time, anarchism, the Paris Commune, the Mondragon Cooperative, publishing SFF in India, the sequel to The Sentence, and more (listen here).

As always, if you haven’t already, you can get your copy of The Sentence here.

What I’m Reading

In an unnamed Spanish village in the Pyrenees, its last surviving inhabitant lies on his deathbed. As he awaits the end, he plunges into a reverie about his own past - and the past of his village - and the slow decay of a once-full life into solitude - a solitude symbolised by the fall of yellow rain.

The Yellow Rain is a genuinely unclassifiable book, although the novel it reminded me most vividly is Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo. Both novels are about the passing of community that was once alive into a terrain of ghosts, and both novels show us the world refracted through the interior landscape of their protagonists. Stylistically, both novels construct a cloying, almost oppressively bleak atmosphere, that colour and taint the actions of their characters. And both The Yellow Rain and Pedro Paramo are novels of unraveling, where a story that begins in medias res unravels strand by strand into its constituent elements, with its core premise creeping up on you without warning.

At an obvious level, The Yellow Rain is a novel about loneliness and melancholy. While reading it, however, I experienced another emotion, one that reminded me of Colm Toibin’s response to Francis Bacon’s 1944 painting, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. In his book of biographical sketches, Love in a Dark Time, Toibin says that the three figures, in their tortured, wordless expressions, call to mind a living being who once knew language, has since forgotten it, but still retains the memory of knowing it.

But more than loneliness and solitude, I found The Yellow Rain to communicate a sense of terror: as in Bacon’s painting, a sense of terror at once having possessed the faculty to live, and to experience life in the fullest way, having since lost it, and now left only with the memory of possessing that faculty (with no way to get it back). I cannot imagine a more fearful end than that.

In part, The Yellow Rain achieves this effect through a skilful synthesis between the protagonist’s interior landscape and the physical environment around him. In his essay, The Two Voices of Virgil’s Aeneid, Adam Perry notes the Roman poet’s technique of mirroring his characters’ emotions in the landscape around them. So, for example, at one point in the book, Llamazares articulates the corrosion of human relationships through the physical spread of rust through the buildings of the village - and remarkably sustains this image for the length of an entire chapter, making the reader feel as if they are plunged into the very realness of it. Or, you have these sharp, staccato bursts:

I remember I spent all day wandering around the village as if in a dream. Despite its undoubted reality. I could not believe what I was seeing. Fences, walls, roofs, windows, doors, everything around me was yellow. Yellow as straw. Yellow as the air on a stormy afternoon or like a lightning flash glimpsed in a bad dream. I could see it. feel it. touch it with my hands, staining my retina and mv fingers just like when I was a child at the old school, playing with paint. What I thought was an illusion, a fleeting visual and mental hallucination, was as real as the fact that I was still alive.

As Eduardo Galeano would describe the writing of Alejo Carpentier, he made you “feel the rain and smell the violent fragrances of the earth and the night.” And that is where the greatest power of this novel lies.

In an age where so much of our reading is curated via social media and online newsletters, there is something romantic about going to a bookshop, chancing upon a book you’ve never heard of, and picking it up solely on the strength of the blurb. That is what happened with me and The Artist (and also why I will always remain a votary of Delhi’s Bookshop Inc, as that is where such things frequently happen).

The Artist is set in 1920, in a country house in a remote part of Provence, where the lives of three individuals intersect - and then collide: Tartuffe, a famous and reclusive painter; Ettie, his niece, caretaker, and caregiver; and Joseph, a journalist newly arrived from London, hoping to make his name by writing a feature about Tartuffe. As the story progresses, however, Joseph finds that Ettie has long harboured an ambition to be a painter herself - an ambition that has been viciously thwarted by Tartuffe at every opportunity. Within Ettie, blazing talent and simmering resentment vie for supremacy, even as Joseph struggles to cultivate his own relationship with Tartuffe, while also grappling with the sparks of mutual attraction that have begun to arc between him and Ettie. Throw in a shocking cameo by Paul Cezanne, and the stage is set for a violently incandescent denouement.

The Artist is a novel that is best read in company, as so much of it is about experiences that are deeply individual, yet intimately shared, and the bridge between the two. Perhaps, indeed, that is the best way to do it full justice.

At its heart, the story is about a woman’s determination to become an artist in a patriarchal art world that sees women as models or muses, but not as painters. There are two things that set the novel apart. First, as an art historian, Lucy Steeds brings a depth and sensitivity to the story that is reminiscent, for example, of how Dona Tartt’s knowledge of classical Greece enriches The Secret History. And secondly, The Artist has one of the most brilliant endings to a novel that I’ve come across in recent times. The novel pivots on two hinges: Ettie’s desire to become an artist, and Ettie’s romance with Joseph. At one level, there is a tension between these two - the first, the struggle of an individual against patriarchy, the second something deeply relational. Steeds, however, crafts an ending that, if not reconciling these two elements, nonetheless manages to honour them both. Once you put the book down, you feel that this, in fact, was the only ending that could ever have been. Far too often, brilliant books are let down by endings that don’t quite stick; but if there was ever a book where the ending made the story, it is The Artist.

It is always a delightful feeling when your fiction and non-fiction reads - quite coincidentally - end up complementing each other. Every year, at the end of August, I spend a week in Budapest, where I make it a point to visit one of my favourite bookstore-that-is-not-a-bookstore in the world: the Hungarian National Gallery’s museum shop. There has not been a single occasion where I have not found an absolutely wonderful new book in their collection, and this time it was The Militant Muse: Love, War and the Women of Surrealism.

As I wrote above, the patriarchal world of art considered women as muses or models, but not as painters in their own right. The Militant Muse explores how surrealism in the inter-war years - under the leadership of Andre Breton - was particularly bad in this regard, and how, nonetheless, a set of women painters fought through these patriarchal barriers and crafted meaning in their own lives, through painting. In five chapters - dealing with five sets of intertwined lives - the book explores both the careers of these women painters, often in relation to, and against, male surrealist painters, but far more importantly, in relation to each other, as colleagues, comrades, and lovers. It also places it in the context of the global politics of the time - Stalinism, fascism, and the looming shadow of World War II. In these pages, I came across names that were familiar to me - such as Frida Kahlo - but, for the most part, names that I had not heard of before, such as Leonora Carrington.

One finishes this book with a renewed understanding of the truly corrosive impacts of patriarchy in the realm of art, but also, with a renewed determination to actively look beyond the received “canon,” to works that have been intentionally suppressed and erased, or just been allowed to be forgotten.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

The 25th August issue has a very interesting piece on NZ SF, titled “I’ll Laugh As You Bury Me: New Zealand, America and Cultural Hegemony.”

The Indian Scene

Congratulations to Abhijeet Sathe for a new story out in the excellent Translunar Travelers Lounge, titled “The Last Wills and Testaments of Captain Kolhe.” Read it here.

Recommendations Corner

I have mentioned Pedro Paramo above - and I’m sure I have recommended it in one of the 102 previous iterations of this newsletter - but then, you can never recommend this gem of Mexican literature enough. I read this book more than twelve years ago, and it has stayed with me since. The best review of the book I’ve read remains this 2008 Slate piece, which does an excellent job of synthesising some of its major themes.